My mother called me last Tuesday, during Week 4 of *Dancing with the Stars*, to ask if I'd seen the cha-cha. She is seventy-eight years old. She lives alone. She has a hip that clicks like a metronome and a television she leaves on for the sound of other human beings. This is what we have built: a country where the closest thing to a community gathering is a celebrity competition show, and even that we now watch in separate houses, texting reactions into the void.
I am not here to bury *Dancing with the Stars*. I am here to ask what it means that it might be the last thing we do together.
Think about what the show actually sells. Former politicians in sequins. Disgraced athletes seeking redemption arcs. Reality stars whose fame is a rumor of a rumor. They are paired with professional dancers who have trained since childhood, and together they perform a ritual of transformation. The clumsy become graceful. The stiff become fluid. The despised become, briefly, beloved. It is a resurrection machine, and we are addicted to resurrections. We have to be. We live in a culture that offers almost no second acts, almost no forgiveness, almost no way back from the small, permanent death of public failure.
The show is also, and I say this without irony, one of the last places on television where you can watch two people touch each other for reasons other than violence.
Consider the alternatives. A police procedural. A superhero punching a skybeam. A reality show about people screaming at each other in kitchens. *Dancing with the Stars* is not high art. It is sometimes not even good. But it is a weekly hour in which adults hold each other with care, count out loud in Spanish, and try not to step on each other's feet. That is a moral instruction manual disguised as light entertainment.
And yet. The show is also a confession of everything we have lost. We no longer have dance halls. We no longer have bowling leagues. We no longer have churches that function as social safety nets. We have a show about dancing, and we watch it alone, and we call our mothers during commercial breaks because it is the only ritual we have left.
The ratings are down. They have been down for years. The show survives on nostalgia and the loyalty of an aging audience — my mother's audience, the last generation that still believes in appointment television, still believes that a Tuesday night can be shared. When she dies, I will not watch alone. I will not watch at all. And that will be that. Another thing we used to do together, gone, replaced by nothing. Not even a worse version. Just nothing.
We are a lonely country. We are a country that has outsourced its rituals to corporations and then watched those corporations cancel the rituals when they stop turning a profit. *Dancing with the Stars* will end, eventually. Everything ends. The question is what we will have left to gather around when it does.
**The Opinion:** The show is silly, and I mean that as praise. But it is also a symptom of a society that has forgotten how to be together without a screen between us. We should be embarrassed that a celebrity dance competition is our last communal campfire. We should also be grateful it still is.