Val Chmerkovskiy is poking fun at Tyra Banks‘ awkward elimination blunder when the Dancing With the Stars host announced the wrong couples who were in the bottom two during Monday’s Top 13 night. The pro dancer, paired with Cheer coach Monica Aldama for Season 29, joked he had been “Steve Harvey’d” after he and Aldama had been declared safe before Banks revealed there had been “an error in our control room” and that the team was actually in danger of going home.
It was a chaotic moment, but Banks was able to get the right teams on stage quickly after learning her cue cards were wrong, apologizing at the time and adding, “This is live TV, right? This is the craziness of live TV!” Ultimately it was Anne Heche and Keo Motsepe who were eliminated, but Chmerkovskiy couldn’t help but see the similarity to when Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner of the Miss Universe pageant in 2015.
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Just got Steve Harvey’d #dwts
— Valentin (@iamValC) October 6, 2020
He opened up to Entertainment Tonight after Monday’s episode, saying of his live reaction the moment, “I’m just thinking 2020, you know? It was crazy, it was shocking. To be honest, we still don’t know. We just came off the stage so I don’t have an answer for you. As Tyra said, it’s live TV. What you see is what you get but I’m glad we get to laugh about it now.”
The pro said it was extra difficult to be in the situation because now it feels like he and Aldama sent Heche and Motsepe home. “We’re such huge fans of Anne and I didn’t even get to, like, be upset over the fact that Anne is leaving because it was such a crazy [moment],” he continued. “But we love Anne and that’s the only negative about this situation. Obviously the positive is that we get to compete for another week and we’re very excited about that.”
Executive producer Andrew Llinares defended Banks to Entertainment Tonight, explaining of the screw-up, “I think we were a little shocked and stunned by what was going on, but this is live TV and you have to deal with situations like this all the time. There was a technical issue as the actual votes were coming in last night. What happened was, Tyra actually had the wrong names on her card.”
