Why does Kate Gosselin dance last? It's about your pocketbook

The tenth season of ABC's Dancing with the Stars has been on TV for a month, and of the four broadcasts in which contestants competed, Kate Gosselin or Pamela Anderson have come last, or nearly last, in the performance order. That's no accident.

Kate and Pam are the most buzzed-about contestants this season, and that includes astronaut Buzz Aldrin himself, who went to the moon and back but was no match for Pammy's bazooms and splits. Kate's the queen of the gossip rags, popular with women, and Pam's the queen of Internet searches by men. The longer ABC waits to show them strutting their stuff, the longer audiences must sit through commercials. And the higher ratings go.

It's one reason that this season, DWTS has sashayed to the front of the ratings pack. In the first week of April, about 23 million Americans watched DWTS. Part of its success is weak competition on other networks. Simon Cowell is sullenly presiding over his final season of Fox's American Idol, which has fallen out of tune thanks to a batch of loser talent. No show in half a decade has eclipsed the ratings titan of Idol, but DWTS has, and it has done it with its results show, which runs against Idol's performance broadcast.

"With reality competitions, the commercial pod right before the winner is revealed generally is best at retaining the program audience," says career TV analyst Steve Sternberg of The Sternberg Report.