Dancing with the Stars 2021: full of controversy

In the recipe for the perfect TV show, it takes a bit of everything: talent, writing, the solidity of a cast up to par and, last but not least, a certain dose of controversy which entices the public and offers precious material to newspapers eager to churn out headlines with a high newsworthiness rate. The equilibrium is very difficult and it is enough for one of these elements to fail to make the formula unbalance and go towards disaster. The sixteenth edition of Dancing with the Stars that recipe tries to replicate it from the first episode but, for one reason or another, there is always something wrong. Once the duration is too creased, another is the forfeit of one of the strongest couples of this year (Al Bano and Oxana Lebedew) and yet another the heated confrontation between a competitor and a member of the jury who, at to be honest and given the past between the two, it was in the air even before the program debuted on Rai1.

Milly Carlucci, a very smart and very clever professional who every year looks for the best way to ensure that her program gives a hard time to the counterpart, that is to that Maria De Filippi with whom she has been teasing for years while maintaining, however, the smile and the calm and elegant tone of voice, he knows what he is doing. This year, for Dancing with the Stars, pushed the production to unlock important budgets to ensure a double purpose: give the program strong names and, if possible, upset the competition with a series of moves that in comparison the Chess Queen is a novice player. Inside Arisa, who has not renewed her commitment as a singing teacher of Friends, and inside also Morgan, who just to Friends he broke off relations with Maria, abandoning the evening halfway through and creating a lot of inconvenience to a production that has always invested all the investments to ensure that the talent reached perfection.

Yet something is not working this year. The minimum listening distance of the first episode of Dancing with that of You are worth it it has gradually become more and more distant to the advantage of the latter, thanks to a formula that is not only balanced, but also stable over time. The reason? Probably an excessive attention to the stories of the protagonists, told more in the way of reality shows than that of variety, and an overwhelming duration that, from 8:35 pm to 1 am, kidnaps the viewer for almost four and a half hours, even putting in the middle of the Tg1 of the night, a test of endurance for the most hardened. The problem, however, is another: the controversy. The November 13 episode saw a very unpleasant confrontation between Morgan and Selvaggia Lucarelli which was echoed in all Rai programs of the last week until the failed showdown on November 20, when the singer preferred to postpone asking Milly and, above all, Alberto Matano who, on the sidelines, had (re) raised the question, to talk about dance.

Pulling the stone and hiding the hand is a mechanism that makes us very nervous on television but, in this case, it was perhaps the only possible solution to ensure that Dancing concentrate on its central fulcrum: the dance and the ability of the protagonists to get involved. Between the improvised kiss of Arisa and the dancer Vito Coppola and the funny curtain with the dancers for a night Lillo and Paolo Calabresi, the highest point of the last episode of Dancing it was the performance of a great one Valeria Fabrizi who, at 85, has shown not only that she is still an immense artist, but also a skilled dancer determined not to back down but, on the contrary, to raise the bar higher and higher to prove her worth to an astonished jury from its class. This is the Dancing with the Stars that we like and that we would like to see. Definitely more interesting than the digs a Federico Fashion Style that, not too covertly, the judges find it inappropriate to dance with a woman for a sexual orientation that, with all due respect, is her business and no one else’s.