• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 3, 2018

“Dancing With the Stars” unveiled its new all-athletes edition this week and received a tepid response.

The two-hour show on Monday night -- 8-10 p.m. Eastern -- drew 8.5 million total viewers and scored a 1.1 rating in the demo (18-49). According to Variety, the show’s total audience was down 30% from the “Dancing With the Stars” premiere last spring (March 20, 2017) and the demo rating was down 40%.

What went wrong? It came down to casting. Very few of the athletes who were recruited to compete are well-known. And some are way past their prime as athletes. More on this later.

This edition of “DWTS” seems to be an experiment aimed at seeing whether the show can work if it focuses on a single category of contestants.

Choosing to mount an all-athletes edition as the first one of these made a certain amount of sense, since athletes have done well on the show -- specifically, gymnasts, ice skaters and football players.

For the record, of the 25 previous editions of “DWTS,” eight were won by athletes -- three football players, three skaters and two gymnasts.

Of the 10 contestants in the new “Dancing With the Stars: Athletes,” three are figure skaters (Adam Rippon, Mirai Nagasu and Tonya Harding) and one is an NFL star (Josh Norman).

One is an NBA legend (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and another is a former Major League Baseball star (Johnny Damon).

The rest are drawn from sports that are not nearly as popular as Olympic figure skating, the NFL and MLB. They are: Arike Ogunbowale (Notre Dame women's basketball player), Chris Mazdzer (Olympic luger), Jamie Anderson (Olympic snowboarder) and Jennie Finch Daigle (Olympic women's softball pitcher).

Two of them were eliminated at the conclusion of Monday's two-hour premiere -- Anderson and Damon. Tonya Harding (seen in the photo above) was in the bottom three and barely escaped elimination.

The results were derived from viewer votes that were cast right up until the final minutes of the show. One wonders whether Anderson was voted off merely because most people probably don't know who she is or did not remember her from earlier in the show.

It is also true that she did not dance well. Neither did Damon, who is much better known. However, the dancer with the least skill on the whole show was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is 71 and evidently having issues with movement.

Nevertheless, viewers voted to keep him around. It was likely a reflection of the respect and admiration the voting viewers felt for him, but for those “DWTS” fans who tuned in to see great dancing, Kareem didn't cut it.

In fact, where actual dancing was concerned, the only standout athletes seen on Monday night were the young figure skaters Rippon and Nagasu, and the NFL’er Norman.

While Tonya Harding drew polite praise from the “DWTS” judges, she is also long past her athletic prime. However, as the most notorious of all the contestants, it is good for the show to keep her around.

In a way, she is a throwback to the regular editions of “DWTS,” in which the diverse cast of contestants sometimes includes the occasional tabloid-news figure -- Bristol Palin, Paula Deen and the like.

But this is a show billed as athletes-only. As such, the show's audience expects athleticism. Translation: Great ballroom dancing. With all due respect to the softball pitcher and the rest, they are dancing duds.

That would be OK for any regular edition of “DWTS” in which the attempts made at competitive ballroom dancing on the part of rank amateurs such as TV chefs are part of the fun. But on this athletes’ edition, watching the duds is no fun at all.

This show's saving grace might turn out to be its brevity. It is scheduled to last just four weeks.