Conner Leavitt didn't win Dancing with the Stars last Tuesday night. He lost, in fact, to a retired gymnast with a titanium hip and a TikTok following. But the 34-year-old former reality-show contestant from Ohio did something arguably more significant: he performed a cha-cha in a sequined vest while the studio audience screamed like Rome had just fallen. And I can't stop thinking about it.
Leavitt, in case you've been living under a rock that somehow still has cable, rose to fame three years ago on a dating show where he famously ate an entire pizza on camera during a rose ceremony. Since then he's monetized his personality into a podcast, a candle line, and now a ballroom dancing career. On paper, none of this should matter. In practice, it's become the most-watched thing on television.
Here's what happened: Leavitt danced. He wasn't great. He wasn't terrible. He was, in the words of judge Bruno Tonioli, "a beautiful disaster in a very expensive suit." The internet responded by generating 2.3 million tweets in forty minutes. His dance partner, a professional who has trained Olympians, looked at him the way a mother looks at a son who just announced he's dropping out of dental school to become a mime. And the audience ate it up.
Why does this matter? Because we've reached a point in American culture where competence is optional and charisma is currency. Leavitt can't dance. He can't sing. He can't act. But he can show up, smile, and make people feel something. And in 2024, that's apparently worth more than skill, training, or a decade of professional dedication. The dancers who actually deserve the trophy are background noise. The man who ate a pizza on national television gets a standing ovation.
This is the same society that made a president out of a reality TV star and a senator out of a football coach. We don't reward excellence anymore. We reward presence. We reward the ability to make us look away from our phones for three consecutive minutes. Leavitt is not a dancer. He's a symptom.
But here's the uncomfortable part: I watched. You watched. We all watched. We tuned in to see if he would trip, or cry, or say something so profoundly stupid that it would become a meme by morning. And he delivered. He always delivers. That's his actual talent. He's a professional human being, and we are his audience, and the transaction is complete.
The judges gave him a 6, a 7, and a 5. Carrie Ann Inaba told him he had "the courage of a lion and the coordination of a baby deer." He cried. The audience cried. I didn't cry, but I did check Twitter, and that's basically the same thing now.
So no, Conner Leavitt didn't win Dancing with the Stars. But he won something else: our attention, our discourse, our collective willingness to lower the bar so far that it becomes a limbo stick. And if that's not a metaphor for the state of American culture, I don't know what is.
We used to want our entertainers to be talented. Now we just want them to be interesting. Leavitt is interesting. That's enough. That's apparently all it takes anymore. And the sad part is, he knows it. We all know it. We just keep dancing anyway.