The Dancing With The Stars finale was held on the Sunday evening and larrikin country and western singer Adam Brand won.

Throughout the 2009 series of Dancing With The Stars, Adam Brand was lucky not to be cast out on numerous occasions – regularly scoring the lowest scores on the night. To everyone’s surprise, he continued to make it through the eliminations and wasn’t really showing a lot of improvement compared to other dancers in the competition.

I was shocked to see that Adam Brand made it through to the Dancing With The Stars final, he just wasn’t dancing well enough compared to other dancers – nor was he the most improved. He was being held up throughout the elimination process by the popularity of the singer and not his dancing skills.

On the night of the finals, Kylie Gillies was voted out first and came third after receiving the highest level of praise from the judges. Next up of course was Matt White and received nearly perfect scores across each of the dances and was still eliminated. Throughout the dances on the night, the comments that the judges were providing to Adam Brand were phrased in a way that equated to “you’ve done a good job but you don’t deserve to win” and some how he came out the other side the winner. According to the Dancing With The Stars Wikipedia article, Adam Brand has now scored the lowest of any finalist in nine seasons to win and by a considerable margin.

I understand that there is a viewer vote, however the viewers got it wrong – horribly wrong. This is without question the major flaw within reality television – crowd sourcing votes doesn’t mean it is right – it just means a lot of people are easily influenced.  Consider what happened with Casey Donovan in Australia Idol – she was proclaimed to be the next big thing according to the public; which I personally felt was a joke and hasn’t managed to sell any significant number of records – which proves the point that viewer voting isn’t a solution.

Compare the viewer voting model from virtually every reality TV show around the world to the phenomenon of Master Chef. In the Master Chef model, there are a panel of industry recognised judges and experts who solely decide the fate of the amateur chefs. I find this to be a great example of how reality TV shows that can facilitate ‘experts’ to work – the contestants are being judged and marked by their peers and recognised experts – not a 15 year old with a mobile phone that is never going to buy a CD.

In my opinion Kylie Gillies and Matt White were robbed of a title for the 2009 season of Dancing With The Stars.