Dancing With the Stars Finale

I seem to have a love/hate relationship with reality shows. I'm very picky about the ones I watch. I tried Survivor for a few weeks a couple seasons ago and it got real old, real fast. My wife, however, has succeeded in getting me hooked on two shows - both completely different from Survivor - American Idol and Dancing With the Stars.

I didn't even see all episodes this season of Dancing With the Stars. I think I picked up on it about half way through this season of competition. As I do with both of the shows mentioned above, I pick up on my favorites rather quickly and usually stick with them as far as the show - and fan votes - will take them.

Now, what I dislike most about shows such as these are the results shows, and not only because there's the possibility that my favorite might not make it. My main reason to hate results shows is that the networks put way too much "fluff" into them that nine times out of ten they're incredibly boring to sit through. This especially came to the surface many times last season with American Idol, including the finale. Their two-hour finale had me in tears because it was so incredibly boring.

If you're going to expect the audience to sit through two hours of "weirdest tryouts" and cheesy group performances, please spice things up a bit. That's why I was incredibly pleased with the Dancing With the Stars finale (it aired live last night, but I didn't watch it until this afternoon). That was a very, very good finale that kept me interested the entire two hours. Old routines performed to new music from all the competitors who were voted off, two heart-pounding elimination rounds, a wide variety of flashbacks covering the entire competition, two performances by Celine Dion (one of them included a montage of events of the entire season) and, to top it all off, we were treated to two of the best routines by the two finalists near the end of the show.

It was great, I liked both of the finalists and wouldn't have minded if either of them won. My votes went to Helio and Julianne the majority of the time, but again, either of them would have satisfied me. Just so happens they also took home the whole she-bang, as well. So, I guess I want to say that I hope more reality shows (take a hint, American Idol) put together results shows, in general, like the finale/result show of Dancing With the Stars, because it was incredibly fun to watch.