ABC/Eric McCandless
Season 29 of Dancing With the Stars features Tyra Banks as the new host of the show after Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews both announced they would not be returning.
On the October 5, 2020, episode of DWTS, there was a mistake during the reveal of the two couples in the bottom two for the week. Banks originally told Monica Aldama and Val Chmerkovskiy that they were safe for the week, but it was soon revealed as a technical error, and they were actually in the bottom two alongside Anne Heche and Keo Motsepe.
At the end of the night, Anne Heche and Keo Motsepe were sent home, and fans took to Twitter to call for Banks to be fired from the show for the error, though she said she was reading from cards that simply had the wrong information written on them.
Banks Apologized for the Error
When the confusion started to play out on the stage, Banks immediately apologized and took a few moments to get things sorted before calling Monica and Val back to the stage.
“There has been an error in the control room,” Banks said during the broadcast. “This is the craziness of live TV. I’m so sorry. This is live TV.”
She later took to Twitter to further explain the mistake, though pro dancer Val simply laughed it off, making a joke in a tweet about the error.
“Wowzers,” Banks wrote on Twitter. “Live TV. Wrong name on cards. So challenging to deal with moments like these. But we power through.”
Just got Steve Harvey’d #dwts
Val made a reference to the 2015 Miss Universe pageant mistake, writing “Just got Steve Harvey’d #dwts.”
Judge Bruno Tonioli defended Banks, saying that the show is live and there will always be mistakes.
“It’s live television, things like this happen, especially with information coming in from all over the country, voting and calculating in such a small amount of time,” Tonioli told Entertainment Tonight. “Tyra was brilliant … she was really good because she took control of the situation.”
Tonioli added that the negativity surrounding the new host is getting “a bit tiring,” and he urged fans to “just let her be who she is.”
Fans Still Call for Banks to Be Fired
After witnessing the mistake, fans took to Twitter to call for Banks to be fired, as they have done every episode since she began hosting the show on September 14.
“This season of Dancing With the Stars probably has one of the best line up of celebrities but Tyra Banks hosting just ruins it for me,” one user tweeted.
“DWTS. Please bring back Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews. Tyra Banks sucks, no personality, all about her wardrobe! Downhill this season,” one user tweeted.
Banks has faced criticism since her first appearance on Dancing With the Stars, and she has recently hit back at the people who are calling for her to be fired.
“Every host messes up,” Banks told Us Weekly. “It’s just normal. It’s live TV. If it wasn’t live, there would be no mess-ups. Even on America’s Next Top Model, I would mess up and tell my editors to leave it in. That’s what makes things human and makes things live.”
In an interview with Glamour, Banks said it was hurtful that people believed she was only hired because of her gender and the color of her skin.
“It actually hurts my feelings a bit that people think that I was hired because I’m a Black woman,” she said. “[DWTS] reached out to me many, many months ago before any of the unrest happened. And it was something that I had to think about for a while because I knew that there’s a lot of responsibility come in to an institution.”
Dancing With the Stars airs at 8 p.m. on Monday nights on ABC.
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