‘Dancing with the Stars 23’ postmortem: On Amber Rose, Maksim Chmerkovskiy’s elimination

What happened to Amber Rose and Maksim Chmerkovskiy on “Dancing with the Stars” this season? They were arguably one of the more-publicized couples entering the season, but despite bringing almost everything to the table that they could, they were sent home on Monday night’s new episode.

In one way, you can consider this the show’s version of taking care of something that could have been inevitable down the road. It was hard to imagine them ever winning the show, and that boils down to the first point we’re going to make in our weekly postmortem series, where we break down precisely what happened to every contestant on their way to elimination this season.

1. Amber was simply too polarizing – She’s known for having big, strong opinions, and we saw that play out at times in the press around the show. She’s not someone everyone knows outside of her opinions, and therefore she falls outside of the traditional box of the people who tend to win this show. To us, she was a great personality for the show to have, someone who enjoyed being different and someone who wouldn’t typically step into a ballroom to learn to dance. We just think that one way or another, her audience size was smaller than the competition.

2. Her dancing was weaker than much of the field – If you look at the field from the past few episodes, you can absolutely see that this was the case. She had scores that were slightly lower, and while we’re bummed out to say that, the proof is in the metaphorical pudding there. We do at times think she was under-scored, but she was probably tied for the weakest of last night in our mind with Maureen McCormick.

3. Timing – Amber is the sort of star who would’ve been about the same in relevance no matter when you cast her. Unfortunately, she was up against people like Lochte, Laurie Hernandez, and Calvin Johnson fresh off of retirement. These are people close to their peak in popularity, and this could have provided an edge in votes.

For those who claim that having Maks, a polarizing pro in his own right, hurt Amber, that may be true; we also just know that he has his fans, so it would be wrong to consider his presence a net negative. If anything, Maks helped to bring her even more attention.

Why do you think Amber was eliminated Monday? Let us know in the comments! (Photo: ABC.)