On Tuesday night, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” star Whitney Leavitt was sent home on “Dancing With the Stars” just a week before the show’s finals, leaving her in sixth place and forever ruining my fantasy bracket at work (which, to be fair, was already busted into oblivion by Andy Richter’s Cinderella-story run this season).
“SLOMW” villain status be damned, Leavitt was so charismatic and seemed like such a natural performer based on her TikToks alone that I had predicted it would be neck-and-neck between her and wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin at the end. She was paired with Mark Ballas, a three-time mirrorball champ and show veteran whose dances over the years have ranked consistently among fans’ favorites. With a background in dance, Leavitt scored near the top of the leaderboard week after week (which itself brought accusations of favoritism, something top-scoring male contestants are immune to, somehow). I thought she’d be a shoo-in.
Clearly, I was wrong.
It’s hard not to wonder if bad timing played a part — it was the first show after Leavitt’s other show, “SLOMW,” dropped its full third season last Thursday. Leavitt is missing for part of it, with her co-stars revealing she wanted out of MomTok, the group of women at the center of the show who are supposedly bound together by sisterhood, social media and a past swinging scandal. She resurfaces midway through the season and tells friends that she left MomTok after what she felt was a half-hearted reentry into the friend group — but allowed the cameras on once more when her agent told her she’d be able to audition for a certain ballroom dance competition show.
It looks damning, a clear admission that she’s only going along with the show for what she can get out of it. But it’s also hard to blame her. “SLOMW” is somewhat unique in reality TV in that it has not shied away from fourth-wall-breaking conversations about show contracts and business opportunities the women get from their influencer statuses. Each cast member has benefited from it. It’s also led to some on-air tension: A big source of conflict last season centered on the revelation that Demi Engemann was willing to have co-star Jessi Ngatikaura axed in order to get more money. No one sided with Engemann then — it looked like a clear-cut betrayal and cemented her shift among fans from a favorite to the villain.
Leavitt’s actions fall a bit more into a gray area. Her coming back only for business opportunities doesn’t directly take away anyone else’s chances or cut into their paycheck — and the drama of her doing so tidily creates a show storyline and gives the rest of the women something to rally around. I suspect that’s why production allowed her back, since she’s not opening up her personal life to scrutiny the way others on the cast are this season (Ngatikaura’s affair and marital troubles take up a good amount of runtime, as does Mikayla Matthews working through her past sexual abuse and current intimacy issues). Throughout the run of the show, Leavitt has fallen squarely into the reality show villain archetype — and she knows it.
“MomTok is a business,” Leavitt says in the episode where she returns, explaining in a confessional that she didn’t feel the women in MomTok genuinely wanted her back in the group. “MomTok is not this sisterhood, friendship, I don’t care what they fucking say. At the end of the day, you don’t care about my feelings, you don’t care about me, you just care about yourself. OK, noted. Let me just start doing that then.”
But as fake as reality television can feel, there’s still genuine people behind it. Leavitt, hurt by the women not accepting her, seems to have hurt others when she stepped back. On the show, co-star Jen Affleck shares before Leavitt’s return that though she was there for her during a hard time, “the minute she gets what she wants, it’s automatic crickets.”
“I’m really conflicted with my relationship with Whitney, because a couple months ago, she really was the only person that was there for me during the lowest point of my life. But the minute I left MomTok, I never heard from her,” Affleck, who was also selected for “DWTS” and made it to Week 7, says. “It felt like it was calculated.”
Maybe it was — and both “SLOMW” and “DWTS” fans are divided on whether that makes Leavitt a boss or a bad friend.
Leavitt knew from the start that being a reality show villain puts your name in people’s mouths, and she parlayed that notoriety all the way to the dance floor just as “Dancing With the Stars” saw its highest viewership in years. But it might have been that ambition that ultimately doomed her chase for the mirrorball.
Leavitt herself didn’t appear to be shocked at her elimination. “We had a gut feeling it was us,” she told E! News Tuesday night. Was it the chatter she was hearing about her “SLOMW” return that led her to that conclusion, or just a natural endpoint of how far her fan base could take her?
In my season predictions, I had forgotten the most important tenet of “DWTS” fandom, oft repeated on various forums during Richter’s surprising survival week after week: It’s not a show about crowning the best dancer. It’s a show about votes, and, crucially, popularity. You have to be beloved by America as much as, or more than, you have to be able to execute a samba roll.
It turns out America loves to watch a villain on a juicy reality show — but is less willing to crown her for it.