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Who'll waltz off with a win on "Dancing with the Stars"?

Verne Gay | Off Camera

May 19, 2008

DANCING WITH THE STARS. Tonight at 8 and tomorrow at 9 on ABC/7.

Reason to watch: The finale! And, to get an answer to that yearning, burning, question "Can a woman ever again - ever - win 'Dancing With the Stars?'"

What to expect: After what seemed like a seriously padded season, it all ends in a rush, with a winner crowned and maybe another little question answered (can someone with only one functional arm win this thing?). Your final three individuals range from the merely good to the ridiculously overqualified.

Soap star Cristián de la Fuente damaged his arm a couple of weeks ago, but promptly swaddled it in a (what else?) bright, spangly athletic support. Jason Taylor doesn't seem to have much natural-born talent for this sort of affair but he certainly cuts a distinctive and dramatic figure on stage. And Kristi Yamaguchi? She was born to win "DWTS," and if the ice tours don't work out, she might think about returning to the show as one of the resident pros.

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The bottom line: It's hard to tune out all the chatter in this post-strike TV era about the decline of network viewers; every show, from "House" to " American Idol" to "Grey's Anatomy," seems to be slip-sliding away. Not so "DWTS," which is actually up (by 2 percent) from last season. Twenty-one million people who vote with their remote each week have made this the second-biggest franchise on TV, and that's a pretty good indication that fans are getting exactly what they want from this glitzy and often deliriously cheesy bauble. (Sequins! Strobes! Samantha Harris' gowns! Get me a pair of sunglasses!)

But what's amazing is that it's gotten almost impossible to distinguish one season from the next; in the finale, we've got a front-runner who's a skating champ (like Apolo Ohno, season 4), and a star football player (like Emmitt Smith, season 3), and, oh yes, a hugely charismatic Latino (like Helio Castroneves, season 5). Meanwhile, many pundits are blithely predicting a Yamaguchi rout, but, in the end, don't most women (usually) vote for male contestants? There may well be no surprise, but that hardly matters. "DWTS" isn't in the business of confounding expectations; it's in the business of meeting them.