Skating with Celebrities

FOX is just hilarious. They're completely shameless in stealing other networks' ideas and coming up with crazy and ridiculous versions of them. And you know what, I love it! ABC tries to find true love with the Bachelor and FOX goes for Joe Millionaire. ABC is off trying to make Dancing with the Stars all serious and elegant, and what does FOX do? They shove a bunch of B-list celebrities on the ice with actual figure skating celebrities and basically make them fall on their asses! The promo makes me laugh every time: "this ain't ballroom dancing!"

But after last night's premiere, color me impressed. They did get a heck of a lot of figure skating star power to participate, and the amateurs did pretty well considering they'd only be practicing for a month. I took some figure skating classes in college, and let me tell you, even the simplest looking stuff takes a lot of practice. And falls. And not to be mean, but these "celebrities" aren't young. Learning something as physically demanding as figure skating has got to be pretty damn hard.

My thoughts on the pairs:

Kurt Browning and Deborah Gibson - They were moving pretty slow, and Deborah's required spin wasn't very inspiring. But they were first, so I feel like the judges were a little generous.

Lloyd Eisler and Kristy Swanson - I actually really like Lloyd Eisler, but their program was also kind of slow. They got scored really strangely low, but I guess that this is more of an entertainment thing and truthfully they weren't that entertaining. I predict Lloyd gets pissed and pulls out all the stops for next week.

Bruce Jenner and Tai Babilonia - Bruce's costume just totally cracked me up. He looked kind of stiff, but he did two waltz jumps and made them look easy which was definitely impressive. And Tai was as beautiful as ever. And Randy Gardner was a choreographer!

Todd Bridges and Jenni Meno - Their program was cute but Todd looked really unstable the whole time and his cowboy boot skates were kind of distracting.

John Zimmerman and Jillian Barberie - It's really bizarre that they let Jillian into this competition because she skated for years as a kid, and it's really obvious. And yeah, they're definitely the "hot" pair. Barring some miracle by the other pairs, they'll probably win...

Dave Coulier and Nancy Kerrigan - Can you say "the Cutting Edge"? Toe-pick! Hahaha. Their program was also really fun and they make a good choice by cutting out the traditional pairs skating moves and doing more of a side by side duo thing.

Oh, and Scott Hamilton and Dorothy Hamill better lace up and skate sometime before the show ends!

On another note, skating is all over the place lately. Last week was the Nationals, and Sasha Cohen guested on Project Runway last night. The task was to design a skating dress for her, and the first segment where all the designers put on their skating outfits before knowing what they are was pretty much the funniest thing EVER. I didn't find any of their designs to be that great but Zulema was the last person I'd have expected to do well and it was nice to see someone different win this week.