‘Dancing with the Stars’ finale rankings: Why Amber Riley, Corbin Bleu are still the top two
Monday night marks the beginning of the “Dancing with the Stars” finale, which to us is really when we start to see who America has really behind behind the most all season long. By and large,t he support has been largely a mystery, save for the fact that Bill Engvall clearly had enough fans to offset some other great dancers in the competition. But this is where it really matters, and by the time Tuesday night is over, there will only be one winner left standing.
This finale is going to be the hardest to rank in some ways, since we genuinely feel like dance ability matters a little more now that there are only a handful of celebrities left and everything becomes more obvious. We still consider audience size to be important, but it’s easier to predict who has the smallest in comparison to who has the biggest support base of all the contenders.
4. Bill Engvall and Emma Slater (last week: 5) – Sorry, Bill, but your luck will run out. There’s still an outside chance that he ends up in the top 3, mostly because crazier things have indeed happened on the series. But we cannot really pinpoint a past season where the winner was significantly far behind some of the other dancers; the closest that you can probably offer up was Emmitt Smith and Mario Lopez, but the divide is much larger in this case.
3. Jack Osbourne and Cheryl Burke (3) – This one is much more interesting to us, given that we do think that with the right freestyle, Jack could win this competition. He’s inspirational, likable, and has a partner who is reasonably well-known. We like to think that all of this stuff is important when you get to this part of the competition. If his scores are close to the others, he has a shot.
2. Corbin Bleu and Karina Smirnoff (2) – Corbin’s performances have been so good most of the season, his base really hasn’t been too tested. The one week he was kind of off, he had the “Game of Thrones” following behind him. He’s an excellent dancer with an excellent partner, but in the end, there are two things hurting him: Disney stars, even past ones, don’t have much of a reputation of winning vs. finishing in second or third place. He’s also just not one of the more well-known Disney stars.
1. Amber Riley and Derek Hough (1) – Derek is to this show what Blake Shelton is to “The Voice.” He has a big following, and he also manages to get great performers almost every season. Gleeks are still a powerful voting block, and it certainly helps that Amber is likable, a great dancer, and she’s pretty easy still to relate to despite coming into this, like Corbin, with a choreography background. She’s been #1 for us all season, and we’re definitely not changing it in this final week.
Be sure to vote below on your pick to win the “Dancing with the Stars” finale! Also, click here to see the list of the special guests for these final two episodes of the fall.
Photo: ABC