‘Dancing With the Stars’ Host Tyra Banks Still Takes Responsibility for Control Room Glitch ‘For the Team’
Dancing with the Stars fans are still talking about a snafu Tyra Banks made on Oct. 5, 2020. Banks said Monica Aldama and Val Chmerkovskiy were safe, but it turned out they had one more dance off against Anne Heche and Keo Motsepe. At the time, Banks said there was an error in the control room. Nearly a year later, she says she’ll take the blame for the DWTS team.
Banks was on a Television Critics Association Zoom panel for Dancing with the Stars Season 30. When the subject of the control room snafu came up, Banks addressed it head on. Dancing with the Stars returns Sept. 20 on ABC.
‘Dancing with the Stars’ wasn’t Tyra Banks’ first mistake on live TV
Banks began her career as a model at age 15. She hosted The Tyra Banks Show from 2005 – 2010 and was a judge on America’s Next Top Model, but she had years of experience on live TV prior to Dancing with the Stars.
“I’ve been doing live TV probably since I was 17, 18 years old,” Banks said. “Used to host live stuff for MTV and then also did two years of America’s Got Talent live. So live TV is pretty normal for me. I actually prefer it because when you tape, you’re taping something for 12 hours, and the director keeps saying do it over and over again. Whereas live, you’re over it pretty fast. Also, my feet tend to hurt. I have long, flat feet in heels.”
Tyra Banks is only the face of the ‘Dancing with the Stars’ team
Banks took over hosting duties from Tom Bergeron, making her the new face of Dancing with the Stars. However, there is a whole team of people making the show work.
“The famous debacle, I mean, people see my face,” Banks said. “They don’t know there’s things in my ears, and there’s directors and things, people saying stuff to me but the world sees me. They don’t understand that there’s a whole thing going on. And so I take the darts and have chosen to be talent in the entertainment industry. That’s who the world sees. So the world is angry at the talent but there’s a whole control room and things happening and craziness going on, and I’m fed certain things, say certain things that I’m told.”
Banks said she accepts that her role is to be the face of the team. So she’d rather have viewers be upset with her than throw her team under the bus.
“It is what it is,” Banks continued. “We are a team and sometimes you have to take darts for the team, and I took them and will continue to take them. Our team will make mistakes. They see my face, and that’s what gets written up and that’s the choice that I’ve made to be on television.”
Tyra Banks’s job is to keep cool under pressure
Banks said she understands her job is to handle tense situations. It’s not to be pleasant when everything is going well. Banks said it was the same thing on her talk show.
“I remember my executive, his name is Jim Paratore,” Banks said. “He said, ‘Tyra, I didn’t want you to be a talk show host and have you do this Tyra Show for when your guest is perfect… You are hired for when things go bad, for when a guest is boring, for when the teleprompter dies, and you’re on live TV.’”
