‘Dancing with the Stars 23’ postmortem: Why Jake T. Austin was eliminated
If you consider yourself a fan of “Wizards of Waverly Place,” Tuesday night’s “Dancing with the Stars” results show was stunning. In general, it was stunning because we lost Jake T. Austin a whole lot earlier than we ever thought we would.
What happened? It’s tough to say, given that past Disney stars including Chelsea Kane and Kyle Massey made it really far on their seasons, and neither was anywhere near as famous as Austin going into the show. There are a few factors that likely led to this, and we’re hear to break them down in our first of what is probably going to be a weekly postmortem article series.
1. A lesser-known partner – Note that Jenna Johnson clearly did everything that she could in order to make this a great experience for Jake, but she doesn’t have the built-in following of some of the people who have been on the show a long time. While Ryan Lochte may have narrowly escaped elimination, he had nostalgia on his side via Cheryl Burke.
2. Weaker scores – Given his age and also his athletic ability, the general sentiment was that he would be better at this than he was. Unfortunately, his recent scores were not that much better than Rick Perry, who managed to make it another week into this season.
3. A more low-key personality – If Jake wanted to win over people who weren’t sure who he was, he probably needed to go even crazier and fight even harder to have them pay attention to him. That didn’t quite happen. As a matter of fact, Jake probably entered the contest with too much of a chip on his shoulder to prove himself as a grown-up actor rather than just the former child star.
4. No love from “The Fosters” – We know that Jake was the one to leave the show, and since the character was recast, that may have kept their social media page from wanting to promote this. It’s just that many other Freeform / Disney Channel stars have more promotion from their network than he did.
5. “Dancing with the Stars” skews older – Inherently, this is not a show where many viewers likely no who he is. He has to win them over, and that proved to be a very tricky task for him this season.
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