Skating with the Stars – This competition was an almost exact duplicate of Dancing with the Stars, which should 
have been great. While they copied the format and even the shiny paddles, they forgot to copy everything that makes Dancing fun to watch. The stars were completely charisma-free (Vince Neil? Crazy Sean Young? Real Housewife Bethenny?) and the host was even worse. We never even learned his name, but he wanted to be Tom Bergeron so badly. And were it not for his complete lack of personality and inability to be funny, he might have gotten close. The routines were largely boring – mostly because every pair had to incorporate the same tricks on any given week. One of the great things about DWTS is the variety of dances and the different ways to interpret them – there are only so many ways that somebody who can’t skate can do a jump. And then there were the judges. Dear Lord, the judges. Soup mainstay Johnny Weir gave us a mostly a smug sense of superiority and increasingly hilarious shirts. Laurieann Gibson said “amazing” all the time and loved everything equally, like a lobotomized Carrie Ann Inaba. And Dick Button, who in all fairness is a skating legend, rambled incoherently (comment to Sean Young – “I loved that movie you were in”) and occasionally held up the wrong side of the score paddle. The producers clearly wanted to hit the DWTS archetypes – Lady who loves things and sometimes cries, flamboyant guy, and cranky old man. They failed miserably.
