Four judges, four 8s, and a photo of James Avery on the screen behind them. Tatyana Ali’s Dedication Night routine on Dancing with the Stars on Tuesday, October 20, was built around the actor who played her father, Philip Banks, on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and it ended with her TV brother, co-host Alfonso Ribeiro, finishing the dance beside her.
Ali and her professional partner, Jan Ravnik, performed a Viennese waltz to Nancy Wilson’s “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am,” and the voice on the track was Ali’s own: she prerecorded the song for the routine. Avery, she explained in rehearsal interviews, was a devoted jazz listener and counted Wilson among his favorite artists. He died on December 31, 2013, at 68, after complications from open-heart surgery.
“Everything I believe about being an artist, was learned at his feet,” Ali wrote on Instagram when she went public with the dedication on Thursday, October 15, shortly after first revealing it on the show’s podcast with Andy Richter.
Why this pairing carried weight
For six seasons, from 1990 to 1996, Ali played Ashley Banks and Ribeiro played Carlton, the cousins Will Smith’s character moved in with in Bel-Air. Avery was the stern, warm center of that house, and his credits also included the voice of Shredder in the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a role Ali made a point of mentioning in her post. Ribeiro went on to win season 19 of Dancing with the Stars and now co-hosts it, which is why his appearance was such a closely kept secret: on Dedication Night the person being honored usually joins the couple on the floor, and with Avery gone the show held back who would stand in until a rehearsal video showed Ribeiro walking into frame.
The staging was simple. Ali opened seated on a couch in a peach gown, Ravnik drew her up into the waltz, and halfway through Ribeiro took over. The pair finished holding hands and then embracing as Avery’s photo filled the screen.
“He planted seeds in people everywhere he went,” Ali said in an interview days before the show. “He was just the most incredible humanitarian.”
What the scores say
The judges were moved, but they did not overpay. Bruno Tonioli, Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and guest judge Kym Johnson each gave an 8, for 32 out of 40. That is 80% of the available points, and it placed Ali and Ravnik in a four-way tie at the bottom of the 10-couple leaderboard, 6 points behind the night’s leaders.
- 38: Amber Glenn and Pasha Pashkov
- 37: Ezra Frech and Daniella Karagach; Jenna Dewan and Alan Bersten, standing in for the suspended Val Chmerkovskiy
- 36: Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson; Julia Stiles and Ezra Sosa
- 35: Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas
- 32: Tatyana Ali and Jan Ravnik; Jackson Olson and Emma Slater; Connor Wood and Rylee Arnold; Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess
Nobody went home on Tuesday. The catch is that two couples will be eliminated next week instead, and because judges’ marks are combined with the audience vote, how viewers felt about the Avery tribute may count for more than the 8s. Two weeks earlier Ali had been in the middle of the pack on Yacht Rock night, so the bottom-four finish is a slip rather than a pattern.
The clip, judged
The show’s own 1-minute-46-second upload gets the emotional beats across cleanly: the couch, the lift into the waltz, the handover to Ribeiro and the final embrace under Avery’s picture. What it cannot hide is the trade-off built into the format. Hough joked that he could have “done with less Alfonso,” and the line had a point. Every bar Ribeiro spends on the floor is a bar Ali is not being judged on, and the panel’s identical 8s read like a vote for the moment rather than for the footwork.
As television, the tribute did what Dedication Night is for. As a competitive dance it left Ali needing a stronger week, and she gets that chance on Tuesday, October 27, at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC and Disney+, the night two couples leave.
Image: Presidio of Monterey, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
