When you put your body on display week after week, there comes a point when people just don't want to watch it any more. No matter how much you wiggle it, wobble it and wave it around, viewers will tell you: "Enough."
This difficult feeling was experienced last night by former Playboy person Kendra Wilkinson, as the little old ladies at home decided they had seen enough of her act.
Wilkinson might count herself somewhat unfortunate to have been dismissed from the dancing mansion this week. Almost every performance until now deserved her a place in the bottom two or three.
However, in Monday's team and individual performance, her lines might have been imperfect, her arms might have been uncertain, but she was, at least, coming to terms with her feet and the concept of performance.
The ABC producers are still coming to terms, however, with how to fill up two hours of airtime. By the time the second hour - in which the eliminations are actually announced - had come along, they were straining to find footage to fill the screen.
While Nicki Minaj, Wayne Brady and James Blunt did what they were paid to do - sell themselves - the producers resorted to placing each of the dancing partners in a dimly-lit set, so that they could share their feelings about each other.
Earlier, Maksim Chmerkovskiy had already told Kirstie Alley: "You were trying to act and I want you to dance." Now, in this little shrink session, Alley was desperately trying to discover what her strengths were, just like an actor desperate for a little love from her agent, her manager, her lawyer or even her lover.
Chmerkovskiy paused before replying, deftly: "Your personality." Would that be her acting personality?
We saw several scenes from the steaming shrink session between Kendra and her partner, Louis Van Amstel. "I love it when you push me really hard," she told him. It hadn't seemed that way during the previous weeks. Indeed, Kendra had turned pouting into an art form, irritability into character trait.
"I don't like taking it easy. I like it when you take me somewhere I've never been before," she continued, as if trying insist that no, really, she enjoyed the pain, loved it, wanted more of it, whip away.
"The next couple of weeks are going to be grueling," Van Amstel shot back, as Kendra stared with rapt intensity. He added: "Now the million dollar question is 'are you ready to do what it takes to make it to the final?'"
No, of course, she wasn't.
Oh, those wily, wicked producers were surely loving these scenes. It has seemed throughout this competition that Kendra had not been their most adored of the contestants. We had been shown quite a few scenes in which she had seemed tetchy, twitchy, difficult and diva-ish. Indeed, we saw, just a couple of weeks ago, how annoyed Van Amstel was with her when she made a comment to the judges about how she didn't care for elegance.
And so, at the end, there stood Kendra and Louis, the latter perhaps secretly praying for the goodbye kiss. They were joined by Kirstie and Maks, and the ineffably wonderful Chelsea Kane and her partner Mark Ballas.
This wasn't the bottom three, remember. "Dancing with the Stars" producers would find that unseemly, even ridiculously truthful. Instead, they opt for their manufactured version of drama.
Ballas had been especially and publicly upset at critique of his and Kane's excellent performance Monday. He didn't seem quite able to distinguish between judge Len Goodman's crusty-mouthed remarks and the fact that he actually gave Ballas and Kane his equal highest marks of the night.
So, as a tweak to Ballas' sensibilities perhaps, he and Kane stood in the non-bottom two.
When the axe finally fell on Kendra's furrowed brow, she declared that she'd lasted seven weeks, which was seven weeks longer than she thought she would. It was an elegant response. Perhaps she has learned something over these seven weeks.
She then walked over to the dance floor with Van Amstel and wiggled and wiggled and wiggled.
This difficult feeling was experienced last night by former Playboy person Kendra Wilkinson, as the little old ladies at home decided they had seen enough of her act.
Wilkinson might count herself somewhat unfortunate to have been dismissed from the dancing mansion this week. Almost every performance until now deserved her a place in the bottom two or three.
However, in Monday's team and individual performance, her lines might have been imperfect, her arms might have been uncertain, but she was, at least, coming to terms with her feet and the concept of performance.
The ABC producers are still coming to terms, however, with how to fill up two hours of airtime. By the time the second hour - in which the eliminations are actually announced - had come along, they were straining to find footage to fill the screen.
While Nicki Minaj, Wayne Brady and James Blunt did what they were paid to do - sell themselves - the producers resorted to placing each of the dancing partners in a dimly-lit set, so that they could share their feelings about each other.
Earlier, Maksim Chmerkovskiy had already told Kirstie Alley: "You were trying to act and I want you to dance." Now, in this little shrink session, Alley was desperately trying to discover what her strengths were, just like an actor desperate for a little love from her agent, her manager, her lawyer or even her lover.
Chmerkovskiy paused before replying, deftly: "Your personality." Would that be her acting personality?
We saw several scenes from the steaming shrink session between Kendra and her partner, Louis Van Amstel. "I love it when you push me really hard," she told him. It hadn't seemed that way during the previous weeks. Indeed, Kendra had turned pouting into an art form, irritability into character trait.
"I don't like taking it easy. I like it when you take me somewhere I've never been before," she continued, as if trying insist that no, really, she enjoyed the pain, loved it, wanted more of it, whip away.
"The next couple of weeks are going to be grueling," Van Amstel shot back, as Kendra stared with rapt intensity. He added: "Now the million dollar question is 'are you ready to do what it takes to make it to the final?'"
No, of course, she wasn't.
Oh, those wily, wicked producers were surely loving these scenes. It has seemed throughout this competition that Kendra had not been their most adored of the contestants. We had been shown quite a few scenes in which she had seemed tetchy, twitchy, difficult and diva-ish. Indeed, we saw, just a couple of weeks ago, how annoyed Van Amstel was with her when she made a comment to the judges about how she didn't care for elegance.
And so, at the end, there stood Kendra and Louis, the latter perhaps secretly praying for the goodbye kiss. They were joined by Kirstie and Maks, and the ineffably wonderful Chelsea Kane and her partner Mark Ballas.
This wasn't the bottom three, remember. "Dancing with the Stars" producers would find that unseemly, even ridiculously truthful. Instead, they opt for their manufactured version of drama.
Ballas had been especially and publicly upset at critique of his and Kane's excellent performance Monday. He didn't seem quite able to distinguish between judge Len Goodman's crusty-mouthed remarks and the fact that he actually gave Ballas and Kane his equal highest marks of the night.
So, as a tweak to Ballas' sensibilities perhaps, he and Kane stood in the non-bottom two.
When the axe finally fell on Kendra's furrowed brow, she declared that she'd lasted seven weeks, which was seven weeks longer than she thought she would. It was an elegant response. Perhaps she has learned something over these seven weeks.
She then walked over to the dance floor with Van Amstel and wiggled and wiggled and wiggled.
