Monday night kicks off the two-part season finale of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" and veteran judge Carrie Ann Inaba is offering the remaining contestants a little bit of advice. Tonight the remaining couples will battle it out on the dance floor with two different styles of routines.
The first round will be "Judges Pick" and the second is freestyle.
"This to me is by far the coolest competition we have had in a long time," Inaba told TV Guide. "I'm really interested to see how it's all going to play out... At this stage, it could be any of them. It's going to be great."
The 46-year-old former dancer said that she was less than thrilled when she first learned who would be competing on Season 19 but is pleased with how it turned out.
"At first on paper, I'm not going to lie, I wasn't too thrilled [with the cast] because I didn't know a lot of the names," she said. "Obviously, we all know Tommy Chong, we all know Alfonso [Ribeiro}. But other than that, there weren't many names that I actually knew. So I was curious. But I was happily surprised... We've brought in a younger demo and I think it has changed up the voting a little."
Inaba then offered the remaining teams - Bethany Mota and Derek Hough, Janel Parrish and Val Chmerkovskiy, Alfonso Ribeiro and Witney Carson, and Sadie Robertson and Mark Ballas - some pointers to help them win the coveted Mirror Ball trophy.
Janel: "I really want to see her grounded, but also light in her performance. I don't want her to get so serious and so gritty that we lose the lightness and the fun factor of the dance... [Even though] she's beautiful and sexy when she dances, she's so much more than that. So I just urge her not to rely on that in her finale, because she is so much more than that."
Sadie: "If she comes out and starts to overthink it or is not confident, it could really work against her... As long as she can stay focused [she can win]."
Bethany: "If she can stay focused the whole way through, she is fierce. Referring to her hip-hop dance from week 5, Inaba said, "She came out of her shell. She found that she actually has her own way of moving and she really found confidence in herself."
Alfonso: Referring to the dance she picked for him to do tonight, Inaba said, "If his back is hurting, it's going to be a painful dance to do. I wanted to call the producers and say, 'Can we change it?' That's not fair.' But it's also one of the dances that he could do incredibly well, and if he did it well, it would be a show-stopper. It would just blow the roof off the ballroom."
Who do you think will win Season 19 of "Dancing with the Stars?"
