Monday night’s start of this season’s “Dancing With the Stars” is required viewing: a pop culture touchstone, a primer for cultural anthropologists, a guide to the most wonderfully schlocky side of American culture as it really is.
It may all be junk compared with, say, what PBS has on that night, but it is probably more telling. Never has a celebrity reality show been more perfectly cast for the moment, never has one so blatantly held up a mirror to current national curiosity.
On its face, the show is a dance competition. Scratch the surface, and the show reveals a country’s craving for cheap titillation, a longing to revisit shared memories and big gooey, guilty pleasures.
“DWTS” is our great national in-joke. Cheesiness is us.
We say we appreciate great actors, smart public servants, gifted athletes and successful inventors. But what we actually tune into are scenes of the once-famous on their way down. We are fascinated by people who step from our collective internal yearbooks to grovel for attention at a late-date reunion.
Now through November, “DWTS” presents an orgy of memories colliding with a gaudy showiness that will monopolize the pop-culture conversation.
“DWTS” has camp appeal, with its sequins and its has-beens, but the lure is more than that. This season, the producers of this slick traffic accident have hit upon the right mix of types.
Just as Barbara Walters tapped a winning formula decades ago — the most fascinating people of the year! — the “DWTS” producers know that Americans are gluttons for tinged celebrity. (see O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Ted Haggard, et al.) While Walters served up the formula straight, it has become, in a postmodern way, twisted; it is now homage to the fallen, or at least the falling.
America has a soft spot for the one-hit wonders, the faded hunks, the eclipsed starlets and tabloid subjects still clinging to recognition. If they are willing to work hard enough, debase themselves and curry favor with the public long past their sell-by dates, we are willing to watch them try.
Rainbow of celebrities
This season’s collection of hams represents the best, most opportunistic batch of second- and third-tier personalities yet. This is the season that really captures what makes American celebrity so bizarre. They range across political/sports/film/TV lines, span generations, ethnicities and demographics, and reach way back in our collective consciousness. They are familiar entities whose names conjure distractions of specific eras, David Hasselhoff! Jennifer Grey! Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino! If you weren’t alive for “Baywatch” or “Dirty Dancing,” you are for “Jersey Shore.”
Together, they will form a spectacle that is so TV, circa 2010. The whole undertaking is emblematic of the medium’s power: At once crazy, inclusive, humiliating, tender, unifying, fun and repulsive.
Their names matter less than their categories: a governor’s daughter. A Hollywood relic who’s a singing star in Europe. A long ago Dirty Dancer. A beloved vintage TV star. And an abdominally impressive reality show exhibitionist.
We can’t wait to see them, chins up, shoulders back, arms high and moving with faux intimacy in a setting that is anything but intimate. We’ve watched them in canned settings —like “Baywatch” and the Republican nominating convention. Now let’s see them perform a different kind of choreography.
The 12 pairs will lunge, strut, tango and twirl beginning Monday, at 7 p.m. on KMGH-Channel 7.
This one’s going to be big.
More than 15 million viewers tuned in for the ABC series’ 10th-season finale last May, nearly tying “American Idol” on Fox. You are forgiven for not recalling that Nicole Scherzinger and Derek Hough were victorious (Scherzinger was the “celebrity,” having been lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls). They won, but it’s Buzz Aldrin and Kate Gosselin that we remember from that lineup, a real-life hero and a reality TV invention, equals on the “DWTS” circuit. On to this year’s “Stars.”
With the bizarre promise of singers Michael Bolton and Brandy (“Moesha”) doing anything but sing, Jennifer Grey inspiring visions of her youthful self “Dirty Dancing” into the arms of the late Patrick Swayze, and single teen mom and Tea Party daughter Bristol Palin offering herself to a grateful nation — well, ratings expectations are high.
We can only hope comedian Margaret Cho lets loose with off-color pithiness to test the ABC censors.
In the midst of a recession, the attraction for millions of cash-strapped, overtired and anxious Americans is clear. We’re not watching a dance competition, we’re watching a hypo- manic personality parade — with glitter.
Crass but muscular Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, away from his “Jersey Shore” housemates, hopes to spread awareness of his very specific image beyond MTV. He is the current standard for young men famous for being famous. (The gossip trades have him interested in hooking up with Palin.) From the accent to the dimwit, no one will out-Sitch the Sitch.
Chiseled Rick Fox, sometime actor, retired basketball player and former husband of more-famous actress Vanessa Williams, is taking time out from those resume lines to savor a bit of attention. Ditto retired NFL quarterback Kurt Warner. They could rest on laurels, but why not flirt with humiliation and grab an extra 900 seconds? Maybe a trained-if-aging athlete has an advantage over an undisciplined youthful housemate with strong abs.
Or maybe a TV mom, the answer to trivia questions, can prevail?
Florence Henderson redux
Florence Henderson of “The Brady Bunch” and Wesson oil commercials will cash in on irony again — as she’s done in cameos in the “Naked Gun” movies, and guest shots from “Roseanne” to “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” Irony, yes, but she also represents current American nostalgia for a simpler time. Oh, Carol Brady, please tell us we’re all still doing OK.
Young Disney Channel star and rapper Kyle Massey (“That’s So Raven”), and Audrina Partridge, unknown TV personality except to those who care about MTV’s “The Hills,” fill out the list. They are the optimistic faces of the corporate monoliths that mint “stars” these days. An endless supply waits in the wings, praying we will learn their names, too.
For better and worse, these are our “stars,” representatives of our culture’s common history.
They may surprise us with some good moves. But when we talk about them at the watercooler this fall, we won’t be measuring their lifts. We’ll be measuring their imprint on a nation in need of a lift.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
