The writhe stuff

IN a fall season of highfalutin serialized dramas, the most compelling soap opera on television has played out on the “Dancing With the Stars” ballroom floor.

Love -- or its lusty cousin -- has blossomed between partners Mario Lopez and Karina Smirnoff, partners Willa Ford and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, and an unidentified coupling co-host Samantha Harris will only allude to and giggle about.

Beauty queen Shanna Moakler got into a bar fight with Paris Hilton, of all people. Country singer Sara Evans had to quit because of trouble in her marriage. Daredevil Monique Coleman had a wardrobe malfunction (her bottom went whoops!) that etched itself as a season highlight for the ever-proper British judge Len Goodman. Teen heartthrobs Lopez and Joey Lawrence got verbal spankings for their breaking-all-the-rules ways. Tucker Carlson dazzled with his skillful chair-sitting routine. Jerry Springer -- Jerry Springer! -- got choked up when he was voted off the competition not because he wanted to stay but because he was overwhelmed by the kindness he had been shown during his seven-week stint.

And if that weren’t enough, NFL legend Emmitt Smith can shimmy, shake and even waltz, earning him the nickname “Twinkle Toes.” Tonight’s finale at 8, which pits him against Lopez, nicknamed “Super Mario” for his flawless, passionate weekly renditions, promises to be the most intense competition this show has seen. The winner is picked by combining the judges’ scores with viewers’ phoned and e-mailed votes and will be announced Wednesday night.

“It’s been so eventful that we haven’t been able to keep up with it,” executive producer Conrad Green said. “To be honest, we just read Us Weekly every week to find out what’s going on on our own production. It’s been really quite dramatic. And the best part of it is that this year the outcome is unpredictable.”

What Green and ABC prefer to keep up with are the show’s soaring ratings. With an average of 20 million viewers, “Dancing With the Stars” is the No. 1 reality series and the fourth most-watched show. In its third season, “Dancing” grew 8% in total viewers and 10% in the desirable 18-to-49-year-old demographic and ranks No. 9 among 18- to 49-year-olds who earn more than $100,000. The live television variety throwback also has grown into one of television’s rare family hours, ranking third with children younger than 11 and 17th among teens, and it is a top 10 show among women in all of the key demographics.

“Our audience skews female, so maybe the boys have more of a chance,” Green said, referring to last week’s semifinal round in which, for the first time, three men -- Lopez, Lawrence and Smith -- were vying for tonight’s finale spots. “They’re good-looking, muscly boys with almost no clothes on. They stay in the competition longer.”

Lopez, 33, Lawrence, 30, and Smith, 37, have surely delivered the goods. After scoring a three-way tie with the judges, Lawrence was voted off by viewers last week, leaving Lopez and Smith to duke it out. Both men will perform sambas and freestyle routines and, for the first time, a third number: Smith will dance a mambo while Lopez will do a pasodoble.

“It feels like a prizefight,” said ABC President of Prime Time Entertainment Steve McPherson. “You have this model against the heavyweight champ in Emmitt Smith and, you know, it’s really a neat thing to see.” McPherson has personal experience. He learned to cha-cha over eight weeks with Edyta Sliwinska (Lawrence’s partner) last spring to perform at the network’s annual presentation to advertisers in New York.

“It’s really a clash of the titans because each one of them has such strength individually,” judge Bruno Tonioli said. “They’ve given such great performances that it makes our job very, very difficult because it’s now going into the realm of whether I prefer blue or green. It doesn’t mean green is a better color than blue.”

Judge Carrie Ann Inaba agreed that it’s all going to come down to individual taste tonight.

“They’re very different characters because you’ve got Mario, who from Day One blew us away,” she said. “Nobody expected that level of quality in his dancing. Then Emmitt coming out and not being the typical dancer, not becoming a ballroom dancer necessarily, but tapping into some other sort of natural grace that he’s got.”

No matter who goes home with the trophy, which host Tom Bergeron half-jokingly describes as “a little mirrored ball on a plastic stand with the show title Scotch-taped on it,” the big winner this season seems to be the art of male ballroom dancing itself. Who could ever call this a girlie sport again after watching Smith’s commanding yet elegant waltz and Lopez’s potent tango?

“In England, a lot of the young boys play soccer and they always thought that dancing was a bit nansy-pansy, but when you boil it all down, you play soccer, you score a goal, and they all kiss each other,” said Goodman. “

Proving that tough guys can dance was a priority for the three semifinalists. Lopez, who signed up for the show to please his mother, refused to wear rhinestones and sequins; his hyper-sexual chemistry with Smirnoff took care of the rest. In the beginning, Lawrence found some of the moves -- pointing his toe or raising his pinkie -- were tough to get right, or feel at ease with.

“You gotta get in touch with a whole different part of you,” Lawrence said. “But when you embrace it, it actually feels very masculine to do that because it is very traditional in the sense that the man leads and does take control of the woman.”

Three-time Super Bowl winner Smith said it was all about “letting go.”

“You have to be comfortable within yourself and understand that for some of the dances, you have to learn different techniques. You have to let loose and let go and be comfortable letting go.”

A happily married father of two, Smith joked about the “love fests” that had emerged and said he did not blame the attractive singletons around him. Co-host Harris agreed.

“You put two gorgeous, sexy, passionate people in a room together, locked up for hours a day, body to body, learning these dances,” she said, “it’s just human nature to fall for each other or have a tryst of some sort. And you know what? Enjoy.”

In a way, only the producers are to blame for the love connections. Celebrities do not audition. They are interviewed and selected based on their personalities and the level of dancing skill producers perceive them to have. Complementary personalities are a factor when they match them with the dancing professionals, but more important are the aesthetics

“A lot of it is height; they need to look good together,” co-executive producer Izzie Pick said. “You’re matching for cohesion and for it to work as a partnership. It’s like matchmaking.”

Smith is the first to admit he “got real lucky” when he was paired with last year’s champion, Cheryl Burke, 22, a top dancer and skillful choreographer.

Smirnoff, 28, is new to the competition this year. Though she and Lopez are reluctant to call themselves a couple, she spends a lot of time cooing “baby” to him off camera, and they are planning to “hibernate” for a week when the show is over “to catch up on sleep.”

Springer, whom Bergeron referred to as “the heart and soul of the show,” still wishes his partner, Kym Johnson, whom he grew to care for as a daughter, had been assigned a more talented partner.

“I was getting concerned that I was replacing far better dancers,” Springer said. “But I was sad to leave because everyone was being incredibly nice to me. In 30 years on television, this is the first time I got to play myself and everyone was so nice. I wish everybody could have a few moments in life like that.”

But even if Lopez and Smith do, only one will go home with the disco ball.

“One of the things I hope we never change is that in the context of this show there’s something charming to me that all they’re doing -- all the hours, all of the bunions, all of the heartache, the exhaustion -- is for bragging rights and the goofiest-looking trophy you’re ever going to see,” Bergeron said.

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Maria.Elena.Fernandez@latimes.com