Donny Osmond made the bombshell announcement on Bonnie Hunt today that he was "seriously considering" joining the cast of Dancing with the Stars. (We'll pause now for the requisite screaming, self-fanning, smelling salts, etc.).
We were shocked to learn that Dancing with the Stars continued its search for America's Next Top Cha Cha-ing Z-Lister after Cloris Leachman was unceremoniously ejected from the proceedings. (Did they really have to insist her partner grab her by her limbs, spin her around, and launch her into the bleachers? That still seems excessively harsh to us.) But continue it did, and multi-purpose, large-breasted Hollywood personality Brooke Burke deservedly took the show's coveted disco ball trophy.To pad out this foregone conclusion, first casualty Jeff Ross was invited back to roast the contestants, presenting the perfect opportunity to get in a few gay-themed jabs at Lance Bass. Because the gayest thing to come out of DWTS has to be Lance Bass—not the fuchsia breakaway sleeves, the Dr. Drew-elicited waterworks, or the soiled dance belt Ross had to peel out from between his ass cheeks following his humiliating first-week defeat. [Dancing with the Stars]
The good news about the Recession just keeps on coming! First it was layoffs at institutional hate monger Focus On the Family, and now it's a failure of reality television! The Los Angeles Times tells us that some once-very popular shows like Deal Or No Deal (aka Guess!), Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and Dancing With the Stars are down precipitously in the numbers this season. They deduce that this might indeed be because of the recession and the fears of stark reality it stirs up (as depicted by Lance Bass dancing). And if that's the case, then maybe this recession is a good thing! Let's just think of it like spring cleaning or an enema. Sure it's unpleasant in its way, but you'll also feel relieved and unburdened when it's over. Frankly, though it will pain me at first, I think I'll learn to live a better life without my beloved Cottage Living magazine, so you should learn to live without Survivor 43: The One Where They Finally Eat Poop. There's been talk of this phenomenon going down on Broadway—that a good purge will revitalize the medium—and maybe the same will be true of television. Look, good scripted TV shows like 30 Rock and Gossip Girl (OK, "good" is sort a of relative term there) are up! in the ratings. So, I know it must seem catastrophic now, but it'll all work out in the end. Sometimes, things just have to burn. It's nature's way.
· Last night's Dancing with the Stars featured a harrowing intake exam with Cody Linley and his recently appendectomied partner, Julianne Hough. Turns out both of them are hopelessly addicted—to mutual respect and admiration! · Our new hero: Wisconsin native Kyle Drinkwine "became so incensed by a lackluster karaoke performance of a heavy metal song that he assaulted the singer and a second man, police charge." "But which song?!" you bellow. "'Holy Diver,' by Ronnie James Dio," we respond. · Life Saver Wint-O-Green mints and The Wedding Singer's Rapping Granny both turned 90 recently. Why not combine parties? Just don't get too drunk and forget which one to put in your mouth for fresher breath. · Funny—25 seconds of this duet with Def Leppard is how long it took us to decide we need a little less Taylor Swift in our lives, too. · Hey, look everyone—it's Nick Denton's latest CT scan a bad omen of things to come! Hold us. It's so very cold and dark and the wolves are scratching at the door.
Digging around our Otherwordly TV Programming inbox this afternoon, we found just the bit of ephemera we'd been praying for: a spot teasing ABC's Unleached, featuring our experimental dance/comedy idol Cloris Leachman's finest outtakes from her abortive journey on Dancing With the Stars. It's all here — the sassy interviews, the heroic training regimens, her heaving bosom, and pretty much everything else preceding her pyrrhic-victory lap on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Alas, when contacted for additional information, an ABC could confirm only that we'd been duped by creative gag-reel editors from the inside. Cruel, and cruelly unfair at that; we'd watch three seasons of Unleached before watching another hour of CBS's entire fall line-up. Are we wrong? [YouTube]
Cloris Leachman's improbable Dancing With the Stars run concluded Tuesday night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where the irascible 82-year-old hoofer ultimately settled not long after being ousted from the show's final seven competitors. Ever the gracious host, Kimmel joined her on his stage, Indian-style, for an exit interview combining a heady blend of batshittery, pathos and defiance amounting to a defeated cry for help that not even nine Emmys, a Golden Globe and an Oscar waiting for Leachman at home could quell. Or maybe it's just her final, insolent means of saying, "Suck it, Lucci." Either way, Cloris remains first in our hearts and has a standing invitation to rearrange our furniture any time. Godspeed, girl. [ABC]
The indomitable Cloris Leachman's quest to become a Sanjaya-level pox/boon to Dancing with Stars continued last night, and it looks like the 82-year-old has finally hit upon a winning formula. First, Leachman shuffles around, doing little but mugging. Then, just as people begin to tire of her simple soft-shoe, she pulls out the big guns: in this case, allowing partner Corky Ballas to grab one leg and one arm and spin her around in the air, treating all of America to an impressively unexpected upskirt shot.Will it be enough to stave off Leachman's elimination for one more week? We'll find out soon, though to judge from the audience reaction shots afterward, Leachman has already won over two disparate admirers: House Bunny star Anna Faris and Flipping Out's Jeff Lewis. And, as the old saying says, "Where the comediennes and OCD martini olive counters go, so goes the nation."
It's a bad time to be backstage at ABC: not even twenty-four hours after word broke about behind-the-scenes in-fighting at The View, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting similar agita over at Dancing with the Stars, where the tyrannical Cloris Leachman has proven impossible to send home. It appears the producers and fellow dancers are firmly on Team Florence Henderson, as they're tired of the 82-year-old Leachman evading the ax simply by hamming it up for the cameras. "She has a Quentin Tarantino role to get to," they cry! "Does she need anything else?"
While it wasn't hard to see some of today's blowups coming, we were unprepared for the latest feud to hit Hollywood: Brady Bunch materfamilias Florence Henderson versus resurgent Dancing with the Stars hoofer Cloris Leachman! The 82-year-old Leachman has paso dobled her way into America's hearts over the past few weeks with her patented brand of cussing and cleavage, but to fellow Dancing vet Henderson, that simply isn't how its done! She spilled on her anti-Cloris crusade to Life & Style:
Portfolio may be struggling to keep current during these dark economic times, but editor Joanne Lipman pulled a clever maneuver when she dispatched a cute, young reporter to meet up with Salman Rushdie at the luxe resort in Mexico. The famed author took the trip to Las Ventanas al Paraiso in Los Cabos, Mexico to promote his new book, The Enchantress of Florence, and was given free plane tickets and accommodations in exchange for showing up at two dinners and a cocktail reception. It doesn't seem like the deal was much of a success for the hotel company: A total of eight paying guests turned up for the two dinners. But that gave Rushdie plenty of time to open up about really important stuff, like Dancing with the Stars, Kim Kardashian, and his busy social life.
We'll start out by saying we've never really been a Dancing with the Stars person, just like we've never been a cat or coconut person. Not that we aren't amenable to garish talent competitions—but there's something so pungently desperate about this particular affair, so, "Look at me world! I've found my Z-list celebrity purpose again!" that it manages to exceed even our vast capacity for brain-smoothing frivolousness. That said—what a show!It kicked off with the familiar kaleidoscopic opener, the viewing of which lulls the audience into a light trance, rendering them pliable to host Tom Bergeron's kinky sexual bidding whenever he utters the word "Bruno." That was followed by a series of political attack spoof ads, the twelfth as funny as the first, plus an encore performance of Lance Bass's sultry Tango del Eyeliner. Sadly, it was Rocco DiSpirito who danced with Death last night, its rhinestone-encrusted scythe falling on the comely chef who ultimately proved incapable of locating the soul inside a samba the way he does his Mama's Meatballs. At least he can go home with his head held high, knowing Mario Batali would never have been able to pull off that fuchsia sleeveless number.
Poor reality show also-ran Rocco DiSpirito. The "celebrity chef," who used to date New York gossip maven Deb Schoeneman (best friend of Gawker profiler Vanessa Grigoriadis! circles!), has had to watch not only his TV show but also his restaurant fail with the NBC reality mess The Restaurant, and has recently been relegated to shilling frozen dinners, concocting failed television shows starring himself, and being a smug judge on Top Chef. His latest public shaming involved shimmying in pink ruffled costumery as a contestant on Last Exit to Hollywood competition show Dancing With the Stars. And the poor fella got voted off last night, defeated by feisty old clam Cloris Leachman, who is 82. Clip of the sad event after the jump.
Click to viewBoomp3.com The world’s ultimate cougar, Cloris Leachman believes she’s capable of carrying anything after carrying the popular ABC reality dance competition for the last few weeks. Leachman even carried her granddaughter a few blocks over to her car. Leachman said, “Put me on NBC and I’ll carry that network across the finish line, too.” [Photo Credit: Splash Pics] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
As far as nightmare-fueling Dancing with the Stars performances go, nothing in the sequence above even approaches Marie Osmond's legendary Baby Doll Dance of Despair—a harrowing journey into wind-up madness that to this day makes our left eyelid twitch whenever we hear the song "Start Me Up" or see the color pink. We'll extend that now to fuchsia, too, as it seems Cloris Leachman's hairpiece-malfunction-plagued rockabilly ballet has already burrowed itself into our subconscious; we hold it singularly responsible for what is sure to be a recurring Busby Berkeley-on-bad-acid fever dream, featuring our worm's-eye view of hundreds of spanky-pants-wearing octogenarians scissor-kicking around us in circle formation.
· After getting booted from Dancing With The Stars last night, famed '80s bohunk Ted McGinley —whose unfortunately high-pitched voice was the only thing separating him from being one of the most dominating leading men of that decade— gave what will soon come to be recognized as the most humiliatingly pathetic concession speech in reality television history. Look on the bright side of things, Ted; at least you still get laid more than Jeffrey Ross. [DWTS] · Looking for the silver lining in our nation's near total economic collapse? Those glass-half-full kids over at USA Today compiled this dandy list of ten films inspired by past instances of financial ruin. [USA Today via MCN] · Sometimes, the title of a video says it all: "Horse takes a dump on stupid ladys head." [YouTube] · It's been some time since we've mentioned Attack Of The Show's impossibly shiny-haired Olivia Munn. But after we saw this sentence hits ou RSS ("Got home from work and fell asleep for a few hours… I woke up with two things on my mind: pie and blogging about pie. This is my story."), we realized it was high time for that streak to be broken. [Hey Olivia!] · We realize we just touched on Shenae's smoking habit like two posts ago, but this picture of her walking through a parking lot after buying not one, not two, but SIX (!!!) packs of Marlboro menthols is about as fierce as it gets. [Just Jared via Skeet On Shenae]
Hollywood may be a youth-obsessed industry, but that doesn't mean we can't find it in our hearts to celebrate a salty old battle axe like Cloris Leachman. In fact, now that the Oscar-winning octogenarian has been added to the cast of Dancing with the Stars, we may have to start watching with regularity — especially if she continues to curse up a storm on the family show, as she did last night. Presented with what she felt was a low score by judge Carrie Ann Inaba, Leachman muttered an epithet that went unheard by most, but couldn't escape Defamer's crack Profanity Investigation Team. Sounds like someone thinks she's still at the Bob Saget roast! [ABC]
· After being ritually abused by cloddish comedians for nearly two hours at the largely laugh-free roast for Bob Saget (save for Norm MacDonald's tremendous bit) a few weeks back, it was good to see Cloris Leachman getting the last laugh on Dancing With The Stars last night. It goes without saying that we were tremendously shocked to discover the Grand Canyon-esque 82 year-old cleavage that she's been hiding all these years. We were not surprised, however, to learn that her classiness and elegance on the dance floor greatly outweighs that of her much younger competitor, Miss Kim Krash-dashian. [DWTS] · American Psycho ... the musical? We can't wait to see what they do with the showstopping "Hip To Be Square" dance number. [ONTD] · We'll take any and every opportunity we get to reset the "I Can Do 200 Of These" guy. [BWE] · Even Megan Fox's mom is pretty sure that story of hers about her alleged affair with a stripper at The Body Shop is total bullshit ("Is it all true? I don’t know. It’s possible she made it up just like it’s possible that it happened."). [Palm Beach Post] · This ancient commercial for a 1-900 number that you would dial to hear other people can't possibly be real, can it? It can only be described as a Jack Handy "Fuzzy Memories" SNL skit meets Chuck Palahniuk. [Videogum]
After one of our operatives wrote in last week to tell us the story of how Kim Kardashian's black Escalade (and bad attitude) held up rescue vehicles headed for a car accident, Kardashian herself repaired to her blog to set the record straight. Or did she? After reading Kardashian's missive, our tipster wrote in to rebut it, claim by claim.
Click to viewBoomp3.com Even though the economy is in shambles and Texans are just starting to recover from the devastating effects of Hurricane Ike over the weekend, there is no force of nature that will keep Kim Kardashian and her family from getting out the word about her upcoming run on Dancing With The Stars. Kris Kardashian-Jenner, the selfless head of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, felt it was very important for her family to get out the message about voting. Mrs. Kardashian-Jenner said, “This is the single most important decision facing the American people right now. We have to keep my darling Kimmy on that show for the next three months. I mean, everybody loves Kim. So, it shouldn’t be a problem, but everybody needs to get out there and vote!” [Photo Credit: Flynet] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
