Hope Solo & Maksim Chmerkovskiy: Season 13

[RickiRick]

Okay, so Hope can't dance very well. She told everyone before the season started, but we didn't want to believe it.

She needs 3 things--technique, musicality, and feelings/emotion, and she has only 1. She is trying really, really hard to develop musicality and feelings, but she doesn't understand that you can't accomplish those by trying really really hard.

The judges are making it more difficult by giving her harsh comments, but they give her generous scores so chill out!

She probably needs to be half drunk to dance well. Or in love with Maks, but that isn't happening.

I think her twitter post, reported above shows the exact problem--she has certain expectations as to how competitions should go and she is unable to accept the fact that this isn't how things works. It reminds me of kids in school that have the best grades and think that once they graduate, they'll be the most successful, only to find out that the kid with the biggest smile, most outgoing personality, or best connections pass them by. It isn't fair, but it is life. This show is the same thing and she has to adjust to the reality of the show, not just complain that it isn't a good way of doing things.

I'd still rather see her dance than Nancy or Bristol 2.0, so I'll keep voting for her. Well, I'm probably just as stuborn as Hope, and since I picked her, I'll vote for her while she lasts.

[Shoepie]

Hope still does not get it that this is a fan based competition. She doesn't have the skill to win either. Dancing is something that cannot be taught if you don't have musicality.

It is clear she has no clue what is going on by her tweet.

The strained relationship she and Maks have is palpable. It radiates through the screen.

[chrisg]

I’ve been really swamped with work so I have had to fast forward through some of this season of DWTS just to keep up at all, but I just wanted to chime in with my two cents about one of my favorite subjects, Maks, and what happened this week since I just watched it last night. And, as background, my initial interest in Maks was definitely in how hot he is, I fully admit that, and his hotness is still a huge draw for me because he seems to get hotter with every passing second, but when Kara started posting his blogs I realized, that, to me, this is a hot guy that is also incredibly intelligent and very perceptive and surprisingly intuitive and, the more I have read his blogs, the more apparent it has become to me that Maks thinks about the world around him in a manner that I have found really strikingly thoughtful and I have often also found myself thinking what a deeply idealistic person he is at the core from reading those blogs regularly and those are not conclusions I am prone to jump to lightly even when a totally hot guy is involved.

And Maks is also highly emotional and intrinsically temperamental which often leads to him being rebellious with authority and, as I have said before, that can be easily perceived as being a rebel with a cause or a rebel without a cause but, for those of us who are not put off by his rebelliousness, which is an understandable view, there is usually substantiation and a core of thoughtfulness, for the most part, behind what he is going off on and what happened this week is no exception, I think. And the general gist Maks is trying to get across rings true, for me, not necessarily just for this season, because I have missed some, but also clearly stems from frustration built up over previous seasons. I did just catch some recent comments here that Tilden and Kara and some other FoRTers have made about Maks echoing frustration that many other people who regularly watch DWTS often comment about and I just think that really hits it home for me in terms of being a dead on observation.

And, of course, not everyone is going to perceive things the same way but there is no doubt, to me, that Maks’ rebelliousness emanates from a place of thoughtful perception and, honestly, even idealism about what he thinks is just and the way he believes, not just DWTS, but the world should be on a wide number of topics. I still remember so clearly the blog Maks wrote defending Erin Andrews against the sexist comments made astoundingly by other women and it took my breath away how astute he was about misogyny and equality and what a deeply ingrained sense of justice Maks has about the world and I really think that is where his outburst emanated from, his frustration about what he perceives as a distinct pattern of unfairness in the DWTS judges’ comments and how deeply it ticks off his core sense of idealism.

And I could not agree more that the judges' comments are often arbitrary and so downright bizarre at times that they do not even remotely match their own scoring and, to add insult to injury, have an alarming lack of consistency between the contestants. Len used to be the exception to that but he has also seemed to be in a downward spiral the past few seasons too and it makes the show incredibly frustrating to watch and if no one says something who is directly involved with DWTS that is never going to change. Things tend to not change in the world without people standing up and having the guts to say essentially, You know what, this is entirely unacceptable.

And there is absolutely no doubt that Maks could work on his delivery at times because when he goes off like that you do kind of have to sort through what he is saying and his emotion takes over and he later has to clarify some things that he said in the heat of the moment but, if he totally changed, he would not be Maks and, like many in the Maksim Adoration Society, I do just adore him, flaws and all and have usually found that, when I look beneath the surface of whatever commotion he is causing, his heart usually tends to be in what I generally perceive to be the right place. And thanks Kara, for often posting his blogs since I probably never would have gotten to see what I have found to be a really compellingly thoughtful and idealistic guy without reading them because I think they are really insightful as to who Maks is on a deeper level.

So, that is my little blog on why I believe Maks to be a rebel with a cause, even though some fine tuning of the delivery of the idealistic rebelliousness, at times, would probably work a little better for whatever the cause is in the long run.

(ETA: Oh, and, my apologies to Matt Damon, but I ran out of time...)

[Bloomers]

How much of this lies at the foot of the producers?

We heard one season from a very reliable inside source that the producers encouraged the pros to talk back to the judges.
We watched Mark last season talk back, get to 3rd place, only to rather conveniently get eliminated during the 3rd week this season.

Maks gets upset and talks back, and he ends up in the (very obvious )NOT bottom two - that is what Tom said - which means that Maks got his
hand popped hard in public for his outburst to the judges. Now isn't that ironic? The producers tell the pros to talk back ( for drama), and when Maks does, they send him a humiliating message by putting him in the fake bottom two.

We also heard at some point that certain contestants are "possibly" assured of staying a certain length of time. This came up with Kate Goslin. Now, we know that producer Conrad Green likes to hire people "with stories". That comes from a direct quote in a media article that was on this board. It is obvious that he also likes to hire those folks who are controversial as well as who have the stories. Whether they get a guaranteed contract so many weeks, I don't know, but it doesn't take a lot of sense to know that he is hiring controversial people in Kate, Bristol, and even sweet Chas Bono.

Now, if those contestants are guaranteed a certain time limit, then their scores cannot be too low, and even if they come in dead last, they aren't going home; therefore, we might hear remarks and scores that just don't go together. I suspect the producers have given the judges a "sense" of what they want to happen with certain people - at least to a certain point in time.

The sense that I have gotten this season is that at a certain point, the judges are turned loose, and they begin to judge differently. It is as if they then begin to "manipulate" the voting.

Bottom line? The producers stir the pot and then stand back and watch what happens.

As far as the Maks controversy itself, it is obvious that there has been a lot of inconsistency in the judging. Some people dance and dance hard. Others walk around while their pros dance, and yet there isn't a lot of difference in the score.
Maks was correct in that assertion, but he also made a rather rude remark to Len. Behind it all I think are the producers.

[chrisg]

How much of this lies at the foot of the producers?

We heard one season from a very reliable inside source that the producers encouraged the pros to talk back to the judges.
We watched Mark last season talk back, get to 3rd place, only to rather conveniently get eliminated during the 3rd week this season.

Maks gets upset and talks back, and he ends up in the (very obvious )NOT bottom two - that is what Tom said - which means that Maks got his
hand popped hard in public for his outburst to the judges. Now isn't that ironic? The producers tell the pros to talk back ( for drama), and when Maks does, they send him a humiliating message by putting him in the fake bottom two.

We also heard at some point that certain contestants are "possibly" assured of staying a certain length of time. This came up with Kate Goslin. Now, we know that producer Conrad Green likes to hire people "with stories". That comes from a direct quote in a media article that was on this board. It is obvious that he also likes to hire those folks who are controversial as well as who have the stories. Whether they get a guaranteed contract so many weeks, I don't know, but it doesn't take a lot of sense to know that he is hiring controversial people in Kate, Bristol, and even sweet Chas Bono.

Now, if those contestants are guaranteed a certain time limit, then their scores cannot be too low, and even if they come in dead last, they aren't going home; therefore, we might hear remarks and scores that just don't go together. I suspect the producers have given the judges a "sense" of what they want to happen with certain people - at least to a certain point in time.

The sense that I have gotten this season is that at a certain point, the judges are turned loose, and they begin to judge differently. It is as if they then begin to "manipulate" the voting.

Bottom line? The producers stir the pot and then stand back and watch what happens.

As far as the Maks controversy itself, it is obvious that there has been a lot of inconsistency in the judging. Some people dance and dance hard. Others walk around while their pros dance, and yet there isn't a lot of difference in the score.
Maks was correct in that assertion, but he also made a rather rude remark to Len. Behind it all I think are the producers.

Hi, Bloomers ! I think those are excellent points, Bloomers, and I do think there has been increasing producer manipulation in everything the judges say and how they score and they know that Maks is someone they can bait into having a reaction like that by picking apart his partners. And the producers may very well encourage Maks to talk back to the judges, it would not surprise me at all, but I also think Maks is genuinely calling BS on their BS, both the judges and the producers, and the producers probably are perfectly fine with it because any publicity is good publicity but I would be shocked if Maks is perfectly fine with it, genuinely floored, because Maks does call BS on them in his blogs fairly routinely, even though very few people read those blogs relative to the audience of the show, and the conclusion that I draw from that is that it authentically ticks Maks off just like it ticks off a lot of us who have taken note of the increasingly bizarre goings on with the judging comments and scoring.

[karalott]

I’ve been really swamped with work so I have had to fast forward through some of this season of DWTS just to keep up at all, but I just wanted to chime in with my two cents about one of my favorite subjects, Maks, and what happened this week since I just watched it last night. And, as background, my initial interest in Maks was definitely in how hot he is, I fully admit that, and his hotness is still a huge draw for me because he seems to get hotter with every passing second, but when Kara started posting his blogs I realized, that, to me, this is a hot guy that is also incredibly intelligent and very perceptive and surprisingly intuitive and, the more I have read his blogs, the more apparent it has become to me that Maks thinks about the world around him in a manner that I have found really strikingly thoughtful and I have often also found myself thinking what a deeply idealistic person he is at the core from reading those blogs regularly and those are not conclusions I am prone to jump to lightly even when a totally hot guy is involved.

And Maks is also highly emotional and intrinsically temperamental which often leads to him being rebellious with authority and, as I have said before, that can be easily perceived as being a rebel with a cause or a rebel without a cause but, for those of us who are not put off by his rebelliousness, which is an understandable view, there is usually substantiation and a core of thoughtfulness, for the most part, behind what he is going off on and what happened this week is no exception, I think. And the general gist Maks is trying to get across rings true, for me, not necessarily just for this season, because I have missed some, but also clearly stems from frustration built up over previous seasons. I did just catch some recent comments here that Tilden and Kara and some other FoRTers have made about Maks echoing frustration that many other people who regularly watch DWTS often comment about and I just think that really hits it home for me in terms of being a dead on observation.

And, of course, not everyone is going to perceive things the same way but there is no doubt, to me, that Maks’ rebelliousness emanates from a place of thoughtful perception and, honestly, even idealism about what he thinks is just and the way he believes, not just DWTS, but the world should be on a wide number of topics. I still remember so clearly the blog Maks wrote defending Erin Andrews against the sexist comments made astoundingly by other women and it took my breath away how astute he was about misogyny and equality and what a deeply ingrained sense of justice Maks has about the world and I really think that is where his outburst emanated from, his frustration about what he perceives as a distinct pattern of unfairness in the DWTS judges’ comments and how deeply it ticks off his core sense of idealism.

And I could not agree more that the judges' comments are often arbitrary and so downright bizarre at times that they do not even remotely match their own scoring and, to add insult to injury, have an alarming lack of consistency between the contestants. Len used to be the exception to that but he has also seemed to be in a downward spiral the past few seasons too and it makes the show incredibly frustrating to watch and if no one says something who is directly involved with DWTS that is never going to change. Things tend to not change in the world without people standing up and having the guts to say essentially, You know what, this is entirely unacceptable.

And there is absolutely no doubt that Maks could work on his delivery at times because when he goes off like that you do kind of have to sort through what he is saying and his emotion takes over and he later has to clarify some things that he said in the heat of the moment but, if he totally changed, he would not be Maks and, like many in the Maksim Adoration Society, I do just adore him, flaws and all and have usually found that, when I look beneath the surface of whatever commotion he is causing, his heart usually tends to be in what I generally perceive to be the right place. And thanks Kara, for often posting his blogs since I probably never would have gotten to see what I have found to be a really compellingly thoughtful and idealistic guy without reading them because I think they are really insightful as to who Maks is on a deeper level.

So, that is my little blog on why I believe Maks to be a rebel with a cause, even though some fine tuning of the delivery of the idealistic rebelliousness, at times, would probably work a little better for whatever the cause is in the long run.

(ETA: Oh, and, my apologies to Matt Damon, but I ran out of time...)

What I love about Maks is he tells it like it is. Unlike Mark, who knowingly goes into a dance totally breaking the rules, but can't own up to it, or having his own ego that his celeb deserves higher scores for the sake of getting them. I've seen where people say Maks has a double standard every season, because he'll say whatever benefits him in that particular season, if his celeb (Kirstie's a constant comparision) gets overpraised and overscored by the judges...but really, what does anyone think any pro is going to say? That their celeb is being overscored? Lacey thinks Chaz deserved higher this week, and I think the judges were being kind. Maks called them out on their lack of constructive criticism and throwing out 9s and 10s for people that showed up while finding technical flaws with someone else and docking points. You could even say CA did that to J.R. when he did his foxtrot, and she didn't get the humor. Maybe all the pros apologizing after the fact was more that Maks seemed to bring them all in as the judges were being unfair to everyone, not just him and Hope. I've been checking CA's twitter for laughs, and I'm guessing it hasn't been easy. She's calling on people to pester Bruno and Len to get their own twitter accounts, and said she's taking tomorrow off. The judges definitely took a beating this week, probably more than Maks. I feel like he and Len sort of handled it the same way: both stood by what they said and made no apologies. Funny thing is, Len was being constructive until he got to the "worst dance" part, and then getting mad that Maks was egging the audience on. Other pros have done it before, and will probably continue to do it. I think Maks has a lot of passion and heart, and this show has given him so many more opportunities, just like the other pros. Even if he doesn't go into the entertainment field when it's all said and done, quite a few of the pros have opened up studios and it's given them the exposure and opportunities for hosting gigs, modeling and sponsorship jobs, TV spots, magazine write ups, guest spots, and the exposure for clients and future students. That's one thing I didn't get with Maks, when he said something about Derek looking out for his own career. I'm not really sure what Derek's career would get from him siding with the judges. I get that they all know it's a TV show and not being held to real competition standards, but at the end of the day, once the show gets axed, ballroom dancing may be all some of the pros have left to make a living. I get it's more some don't want it being misrepresented as something it's not, and having people be turned off when they discover it's not as flashy as what's seen on TV (and I suppose that could go for other dance shows that promote different styles).

Either way, I think the feud is probably being blown up and made into a bigger deal, and likely a lot of things are being said out of context or misunderstood and it'll all get figured out. I doubt we'll see Maks and Derek butting heads in the team rehearsal, but I do think next week will finally be Hope's swan song. I just hope she can go out with a smile. Back to Maks and his spirit, I had been watching episodes of The Bachelor Ukraine (which I vowed never to do, but a boring night at work led me to reading translated clips and I got hooked). Anyway, one clip featured Maks taking the ladies remaining at the time back to his old apartment in the Ukraine. It was really touching to see Maks get choked up and have to walk away for a few minutes. I think he realizes how lucky he is to have made it where he has. I definitely admire the closeness he has with his family, and deep down, under the bad boy image and any scent of arrogance, I think Tom's assessment that he's a big marshmellow with a big heart and a lot of drive and passion for what he's doing is accurate. I've seen interviews on Youtube where Maks talks about how he got involved with the show, and it always revolves around wanting to promote dance and ballroom. I think he gets frustrated, but we see so little of the actual rehearsals, and they're going to tell the story of how they want it to play out. Even with some of his more decent and memorable partnerships, Maks would always be clashing and seen as the bad guy. He's probably had more video edits of coming down hard on his celeb or making them cry and feel insecure, but who knows how much of that is true. He's stayed in touch with quite a few of his partners and former alumni, so he can't be that bad. I think both feel like they can't do anything right to please the judges. It's the second week in a row Hope's mentioned she doesn't get it. She's not a dancer, and unfortuantely I think what we're seeing is the best anyone would have gotten. I hope she can leave on a happy note. You're welcome on posting his blogs I like to read what the pros have to say. Louis's been posting his own blogs on ABC every Tuesday. He says they should bring him in as a judge. I agree! Even though he's friends with the pros, he could probably still be impartial. I don't know what other pros do blogs; Mark usually does one for USA Today, and I also think Kym writes one for US Weekly.

[MsDiva2007]

Hmm I don't know Louie was on Access Hollywood and he said Bruno and Carrie ann have no Ballroom experience,lol. So some of the other Pros are tired of it also.

[pasodoble]

I really hope she goes home next week. Sorry but she is a total clunker with a bland personality.

[indy1945]

I wonder if another part to Maks frustration is that he thought Hope would really be a good contender and she isn't.

[MFWalkoff]

I wonder if another part to Maks frustration is that he thought Hope would really be a good contender and she isn't.

I think that's a larger part of it than he wants to admit. On paper Hope should be a real contender, but ultimately she has no aptitude for dancing, and worse, with her attitude she's virtually unteachable. It has to be frustrating to know early in the season that it's only a matter of time...