Underdog glides to victory in ‘Skating’

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But eventually, it was time to announce a winner. While both teams scored high, Swanson and Eisler took home the victory, and they were awarded some sort of Lucite trophy, one of the only a few that can honestly be said to be uglier than the notoriously ugly trophy handed out on “Dancing With The Stars.”

Speaking of which, the interesting postmortem on this show is the matter of why it was so boring and average when “Dancing” is so much more fun. Was it the absence of viewer voting, which took out part of the unpredictability that led to the lengthy stays of Master P and Jerry Rice and the early exit of Giselle Fernandez? Perhaps viewers would have kept Todd Bridges around for a while just to see how many bones he could break.

It may also be that people have much more opportunity to see good pairs skating than they do ballroom dancing, at least if they limit their exposure to traditional broadcast and cable fare. Perhaps Drew Lachey would have looked like Bruce Jenner if we all obsessively watched professionals do the paso doble once every four years.

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For whatever reason, by the time Swanson and Eisler won, it was quite clear that no one cared. Possibly not even Swanson and Eisler. Barberie cared, it seemed, but only in a kind of brittle, irritated way that looked like resentment of her inability to beat people she was easily beating early in the run of the show. She didn’t help her image with the constant references to her horrible injuries or her need to remind us how good she was in practice. It was surprising that a woman who has made her career trading on the kind of easy likeability that translates so well for NFL coverage and morning shows was rather charmless in this setting.

It’s unlikely that this will be the end of the attempts to cash in on “Dancing,” but producers would be well-advised to keep in mind that making this sort of a show work is (apparently) not as easy as it looks. That said, tune in next week for the premiere of “Curling With People You May Have Heard Of.”

Linda Holmes is a writer in Bloomington, Minn.

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