Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 16, 2026
Jimmy Kimmel’s sidekick, Guillermo, was eliminated from Dancing with the Stars this week. It was sad! But also, Guillermo is a terrible dancer. Still, he went out on a high note, scoring a generous 6 from the notoriously nitpicky Carrie Ann Inaba for a sloppy but wildly entertaining performance.
That’s not what this week’s controversy is about, though. That honor belongs to actor Harry Shum, Jr., who is almost certainly one of the top three dancers on this season of DWTS. He delivered a rousing, crowd-pleasing routine to Usher’s “Yeah!” this week. The only problem, according to Inaba, was that it wasn’t a samba, which was the dance he was supposed to be performing. That’s not really Shum’s fault — it’s the fault of his pro partner, Jenna Johnson, who choreographs their routines. The pros usually skate by without criticism, regardless of how their celebrities perform, so it was a little unusual (and awkward) when Inaba took aim at Johnson’s choreography.
“I think you need to put more content in your dances. Especially because [Harry’s] so good, I want to see you challenge yourself a little bit more in the vein of what we’re looking for,” Inaba said, before nitpicking Johnson over the definition of a lift. Johnson, honestly, looked like a deer in headlights, as if to say, “Why are you criticizing me? I’m not the contestant.” To be fair, Harry is good (he’s a former backup dancer), but I’m not sure the audience gives a damn about the technical specifics of a samba.
Anyway, one of the other pros, Val Chmerkovskiy (who is paired this season with Jenna Dewan, another former professional dancer), happens to be married to Jenna Johnson, and after the show, he took to social media to defend his wife in a way that did not go over well. “You almost saw Fresh Prince enter the ballroom last night,” Chmerkovskiy posted, a clear reference to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. (Making it even more pointed, co-host Alfonso Ribeiro is a former cast member of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.)
Inaba soon fired back on Instagram: “So this is what we are doing now?”
It was a weird tiff between two people on the show who aren’t even contestants, and unsurprisingly, a joke about slapping a woman didn’t land. Chmerkovskiy has since apologized.
“I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart for my recent post,” he wrote on his Instagram Story yesterday. “I have reached out to Carrie Ann to apologize directly and personally, and I also want to apologize publicly as I understand my words affect so many outside of our internal DWTS family. I should have never made the reference that I did and I deeply regret it. I recognize that I am in a fortunate position to have a platform and to be a role model to some, and I need to treat that with more care by actively pausing to think before I post to ensure what I am sharing aligns with who I am, and who I want to be for you all.”
And that is the latest DWTS controversy explained.
