Actually, ‘Dancing With The Stars’ desperately needs the threat of physical violence

In a year of absolutely exhausting discourse, I genuinely thought we had moved past the need to litigate the sanctity of the ballroom. Yet here we are. Val Chmerkovskiy, a titan of the televised quickstep, has been benched by BBC Studios for a week simply for taking to TikTok and implying he might recreate Will Smith’s 2022 Oscar slap to defend his wife, Jenna Johnson. The pearls have been clutched. The press tour has been derailed. And frankly, as someone who has spent the better part of a decade observing the ebb and flow of prestige television from the best tables at Cecconi's, I am appalled at our collective cowardice.

When I was having a chopped salad with a streamer executive earlier this week—an off-the-record lunch that I will now be placing on the record because the stakes are simply too high—we both agreed that the industry is suffering from a terminal lack of stakes. What Val understood, and what his detractors glaringly miss, is that the rumba is fundamentally a martial art. If a judge critiques your spouse’s frame and your immediate instinct isn’t to march across the parquet and deliver a flat-handed strike to their jaw on live television, you are not making art. You are just doing cardio.

BBC Studios released a statement claiming that the well-being of everyone who works on Dancing with the Stars is non-negotiable. I had to read that sentence three times to my publicist just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

Since when is well-being non-negotiable in the entertainment industry? I have been on sets where the craft services table was literally just a bowl of unregulated stimulants and a prayer, and we won three Emmys. The sudden insistence that a dancer shouldn't have to worry about a retaliatory smack while rendering a numeric paddle score is a chilling overreach by human resources. We are bubble-wrapping our creatives.

Will Smith’s 2022 Academy Awards moment was, undeniably, the most vital piece of unscripted television of the decade. It had passion. It had narrative clarity. It had a massive impact on tracking numbers. Val was merely trying to import that level of cinematic prestige to a Tuesday night ABC reality show. He stated clearly that his instinct was to defend his wife, which is exactly the sort of throwback, red-blooded chivalry that the box office is currently starving for. We complain that modern leading men lack edge, yet when a Ukrainian dance professional offers to physically strike a judge over a samba critique, we suspend him? Make no mistake: this is why the movies are dying.

I sat next to a very prominent showrunner on a flight from JFK to LAX last month, and he confided in me that the hardest part of casting a competition show today is finding people willing to die for the bit. Val is willing. He understands that if you aren't willing to absorb a misdemeanor battery charge for your partner’s Argentine tango, you have no business wearing a rhinestone lapel.

The suspension will lift, of course. The reps will smooth things over, the apologies will be meticulously drafted, and Val will return to the floor. But the damage to the culture has been done. The next time a couple takes the floor to perform a Viennese waltz, the audience will know, in the back of their minds, that absolutely no one is in danger of being slapped. And that is a tragedy we will all have to live with.