Val Apologizes to Jenna Dewan on DWTS After Suspension

Sometimes the most honest moment on Dancing with the Stars doesn’t happen on the dance floor at all. It happens in rehearsal, with the cameras rolling, when somebody finally says the thing everybody at home has been thinking. That was the scene on Tuesday night, when Val Chmerkovskiy looked straight at his partner Jenna Dewan and owned the mess of the past two weeks — no excuses, no spin, just a plain apology.

“I am so sorry for all of that chaos, you did not deserve that,” Val told Jenna during the couple’s Horror Movie Night rehearsal package. She didn’t make him squirm for it. She said she forgives him, and the two of them got straight back to work. If you’ve been following this season at all, you know how much weight that little exchange carried. This partnership has been through a proper storm in a very short time, and for one night at least, the dancing did the talking again.

Because here’s the thing: the dance that followed was genuinely good. Jenna and Val performed an Argentine Tango for Horror Night, all sharp lines and smouldering eye contact, the kind of routine that reminds you why Val has lasted so long on this show. When the music stopped, Carrie Ann Inaba — the very judge at the centre of the recent controversy — went out of her way to start her critique by praising Val, telling him he had “incredible choreography.” Then she handed Jenna a nine. Derek Hough gave them a ten. Bruno Tonioli and guest judge Shirley Ballas both gave nines. That’s a 37 out of 40, and more importantly, it felt like a reset.

What actually went wrong two weeks ago

To understand why that apology mattered, you have to rewind to week five. Carrie Ann criticised Jenna and Val for a lift in their routine, and the reaction didn’t stay in the ballroom. Val took to social media afterwards and posted something that drew a parallel to Will Smith’s infamous Oscars slap — a comparison that, let’s be honest, was always going to land badly. It turned a routine judging disagreement into a full-blown talking point, and suddenly the story wasn’t about the dancing anymore.

Val later issued a public apology to Carrie Ann, but the show still handed him a one-week suspension. That meant he sat out week six entirely, and Jenna had to dance with somebody else. Alan Bersten, who had already been eliminated from the competition this season, stepped back in to partner her for that week. Think about that for a second. Jenna, who came into this season with serious dance credentials of her own, spent a week learning a routine with a stand-in partner while her actual partner watched from the sidelines. That’s not just awkward television. That’s a partnership thrown completely off its rhythm at exactly the point in the season when routines get harder and the field gets thinner.

The show addressed Val’s absence on air last week, but there are some things a voiceover can’t fix. Trust between a pro and a celebrity partner is built in rehearsal rooms, in hundreds of tiny corrections and inside jokes, and a week apart — especially a week apart for that reason — can crack it. Which is why Tuesday’s rehearsal package felt so deliberate. The show didn’t bury the apology in a throwaway line. It put it front and centre, before the dance, so viewers could watch the repair happen in real time.

Why this pairing was always going to be fascinating

On paper, Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy should be one of the strongest pairings of season 35. Jenna isn’t a celebrity who learned to dance for the show. She’s a dancer, full stop. She broke out in Step Up back in 2006, the dance movie that basically defined a generation of teenagers’ relationship with choreography, and she has spent the years since moving between acting, dancing, and hosting with an ease that a lot of performers would kill for. She knows what a rehearsal room feels like. She knows what it costs to get a routine right. She also knows, probably better than most celebrity contestants, when a routine is working and when it isn’t.

Val, meanwhile, is one of the show’s great survivors. He joined Dancing with the Stars as a pro years ago, following in the footsteps of his older brother Maksim, and he has built a career on a very specific skill: taking a famous face and turning them into a dancer the audience actually roots for. He won the mirrorball trophy with Rumer Willis, then again with Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez, and again with actor Xochitl Gomez. That’s three wins across very different kinds of partners, which tells you something. Val doesn’t have one formula. He reads the person in front of him and builds around them.

That history is part of why the last fortnight stung. Val knows how this show works. He knows that a judge’s critique, even a harsh one, is part of the deal, and he knows that taking a disagreement off the dance floor and onto social media rarely helps the person you’re supposed to be protecting — your partner. His apology on Tuesday sounded like a man who had sat with that for a week and didn’t love what he saw. Jenna’s response, quick and gracious, sounded like a partner who wanted to move on. Both of those things can be true at once, and on a reality competition show, that’s about as clean a resolution as you’re going to get.

Horror Night raised the stakes for everyone

Horror Night is one of those themed weeks that sounds like fun until you’re actually in it. The costumes are elaborate, the music is dramatic, and the whole night leans into character in a way that can either lift a couple or swallow them whole. A tango already has drama built in — it’s all tension and release, all eye contact and held pauses — so pairing it with a horror theme was a smart call for Jenna and Val. It played to their strengths instead of asking them to pretend to be something they’re not.

It also helped that the judging panel had a fresh voice in the mix. Shirley Ballas, the head judge of the UK’s Strictly Come Dancing and the mother of DWTS pro Mark Ballas, joined as a guest judge for the night, and she did not come to hand out easy marks. She gave out some notably low scores across the evening, including a four for one couple, which made her nine for Jenna feel earned rather than generous. When a guest judge is that tough on everybody else, a high score stops being a participation prize. It becomes a statement.

Carrie Ann’s reaction mattered for a different reason. She could have kept her critique strictly about Jenna’s footwork or frame and left Val out of it entirely. Instead, she opened by praising his choreography, in front of everyone, on the same night he had apologised to his partner on camera. Whether you read that as forgiveness, professionalism, or just a judge calling a good routine a good routine, it closed a loop. The three people at the centre of the controversy were, for one night, all on the same page again. That’s not nothing on a show that lives on drama.

What happens next for Jenna and Val

The obvious question now is whether this reset sticks. Dancing with the Stars doesn’t slow down for anybody, and the weeks ahead only get harder. The routines get longer, the themes get trickier, and the audience vote gets less forgiving as the field narrows. Jenna and Val have shown they can score well — a 37 is a serious total at this stage — but consistency is the real test. One great tango doesn’t erase a disrupted week. It just proves the partnership still has something worth fighting for.

There’s also the matter of momentum. Couples who survive a public wobble often come back stronger, because the audience has seen them at their worst and watched them fix it. But the opposite can happen too. A controversy can become the story, and every routine after it gets judged against the drama instead of the dancing. Jenna and Val’s best move, honestly, is the boring one: keep showing up, keep dancing well, and let the work pile up until the suspension week feels like a footnote. Tuesday was a good start on that front. The apology was short. The dance was strong. The scores backed it up.

And if we’re being honest, there’s something quietly refreshing about the way this played out. Reality TV loves a feud that drags on for weeks, with cryptic posts and carefully worded statements and everybody’s friends weighing in. This one didn’t go that way. A dancer apologised to his partner, his partner forgave him, a judge praised his work, and the show moved on to the dancing. That’s not the messiest ending. It might just be the most grown-up one this season has produced so far — and for Jenna and Val, it’s exactly the fresh start they needed.

Source: Just Jared