Why I love "Dancing with the Stars'

"Dancing with the Stars" premiered in the summer of 2005 as a throwaway TV series with a simple premise: Each season, a gaggle of "stars" I've never heard of, like Lisa Vanderpump of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," are paired off with professional ballroom and Latin dancers. Every week the pros are given specific dances, usually one of the main competitive dances (Argentine tango, cha-cha-cha, foxtrot, jive, paso doble, samba, rumba, waltz), which they teach their star partners.

Each pro is also given a song, to which he or she choreographs a 90-second number in the assigned genre, teaching that to the star as well. The two then get spray tans, don ballroom competition costumes— tight, spangled/fringed/shiny, and showing plenty of skin, for both men and women — and perform on Monday's two-hour performance show. The live dances are interspersed with footage of each pair's rehearsals and other more-or-less staged behind-the-scenes incidents.

Meet our judges

The dances are scored by a panel of professionals— which, unlike many of these competition shows, has remained stable since the show's debut. The former Fly Girl Carrie Ann Inaba's persona is warm and concerned: She presents her criticisms gently, almost apologetically. She also personifies the heterosexual female audience in her enthusiastic response to the sixpack abs of the often-shirtless male dancers.

Len Goodman — the only judge with an actual background in ballroom dance, as a former Blackpool champion and longtime teacher— is the stickler of the trio. He expects the stars to perform the dances properly, and the audience reliably boos his critical remarks.

Bruno Tonioli, whose professional experience is mostly in choreographing rock concerts and music videos, specializes in alliterative gush, delivered while crouching over the judges' table and gesturing extravagantly. Given that he's openly gay and his most over-the-top comments concern the sexiness of barely nubile young women, he's always in imminent danger of spilling over from the effusive to the rhapsodically inappropriate.

Vote early and often

The judges' scores are combined with those of the viewing audience; we are encouraged to vote early and often. Since the voting methods are myriad (phone, text or online via the ABC website, Twitter or Facebook), a fan can theoretically vote dozens of times each week.

The numbers are crunched in time for the Tuesday night "results" show. In addition to the announcements of who is safe and who is still in danger of elimination— which are stretched through the entire hour— the results shows feature a variety guests, both dancers (some of them amateurs with heartwarming stories) and musicians, to whose soon-to-be hit songs professional dancers perform.

All of this happens every week for ten weeks, until, at the end, one couple wins … a matched pair of garish disco-ball trophies.

So what makes this cheese so palatable— nay, addictive— to otherwise discerning connoisseurs like me?

Ex-jocks abound

Some of it, believe it or not, is the quality of the dancing. Although the stars theoretically come into the show with no dance training, many of them are actually "ringers." Professional performers have included former boy-band and girl-group members who had learned tight choreography during their teen idol days; both Donny and Marie Osmond; and Jennifer Grey, whose best-known movie was the '80s musical Dirty Dancing.

The show includes several professional athletes each season: NFL players, for instance— Emmitt Smith, Hines Ward and Donald Driver all won their seasons, and Jerry Rice and Warren Sapp both came in second— or Olympians like the speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, the figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and the gymnast Shawn Johnson, all of whom won their seasons.

One of these ringers usually wins, and the utterly two-left-footed tend to be eliminated fairly early on— but there's always a significant middle group of people who lack both aptitude and experience but who throw themselves unreservedly into the process and win over the audience with their sincerity and hard work.

A bully bows out

Getting to know these middle-of-the-pack contestants over the course of the season is another of the show's attractions. I was astonished to become a big fan of the "reality" star Kelly Osborne during her season, for instance, because despite her punk brat appearance, she took the competition seriously. The pro rodeo cowboy Ty Murray and the snowboarder Louie Vito also got unexpectedly far when the fans responded positively to their enjoyment and dedication.

Since many of the pros return season after season, they become familiar to us as well, giving the show a continuity that similar performance competitions like "American Idol" lack. We see how well the same pro performs with different star partners, as personalities mesh or clash.

Maksim Chmerkovskiy, for instance, has a reputation of being tough— verging on bullying— with his female stars and for talking back to the judges. Unfortunately, Maks took the competition too seriously. After 14 seasons on the show, he was not invited back for the current (16th) season, in order to "bring the innocence back to the show and the positivity and the fun," according to his much-loved fellow pro Derek Hough.

Host's delicate challenge

The job of keeping serious but not too serious falls most visibly to the show's host, Tom Bergeron, whose bone-dry ad-libs manage to puncture the absurdity of the enterprise without mocking the participants. In his capable hands, what could become a nightmare of earnest Lawrence Welk wholesomeness instead becomes a joke— a gentle, loving joke— that all of us participate in.

For instance, Bergeron is the one took to calling the champions' award "the coveted mirror-ball trophy." That formulaic designation combines the acknowledgment that pros and stars take this utterly absurd competition completely seriously with the awareness that the competition is, indeed, utterly absurd.

How seriously do participants take it? Watch this clip of the announcement of the winners of last fall's Season 15, the show's first all-star season.

The season's winning pro, Tony Dovolani, is hugely popular not only with the audience but with the cast as well, and though he'd previously made it to the final three twice, he'd never finished higher than third. If you can watch that video without smiling at his joy— well, you may just be too cynical for "Dancing with the Stars."

Me, I've got Monday evenings spoken for for the next two months.