‘Dancing’ co-host keeps tripping

We Americans are willing to take a lot of garbage when it comes to our television hosts. Just look at Billy Bush. That guy is famous and yet universally reviled, it seems. That is to say nothing of that woman who hosted “The Swan” or the one from “Top Chef.” “Where do they get these people?” we think. “How do you come to specialize in being pleasantly bland? Oh, well, they’re hosting this show, so they must know something.”

The country might be ready to revolt, however, on the topic of Samantha Harris.

Samantha plays “special correspondent” on “Dancing With the Stars.” While Tom Bergeron plays the genial MC, Samantha is always on the scene! To breathlessly interview contestants backstage!

To her credit, Samantha is beautiful and has wonderful hair. Her gowns are actually attractive, and not in a cheeseball, adult-prom kind of way. She has that husky voice that seems to indicate she’s no creampuff. Sometimes she even has a hint of a seed of a wit (which means she’s a sharp cookie, in reality-TV world).

Despite her obvious skills, however, Samantha seems more inept handling the role of co-host than anyone we’ve seen. And we’ve seen a lot.

She always has troubles with her lines -- delivering them, not remembering them. We sometimes feel bad for her, sometimes not.

However, in Monday’s episode, Samantha sank to a low. About halfway through the show, she accidentally revealed Laila Ali and Maksim Chmerkovskiy’s scores before she was meant to. She explained to the audience, very professionally, that she had heard the scores in her earphone and just got so excited that she said it out loud. We could see how that might happen. But it made Laila and Maks look dumb when they didn’t know if it was time to look happy or not.

Then, in the second half of the show, Samantha felt an anecdote being told by Ian Ziering wasn’t clear enough to the audience, so she interrupted, strangely, to clarify it, throwing off the backstage rhythm and throwing Ziering off his banter game. Samantha! If somebody is telling a confusing story, just laugh at the end and say nothing. Don’t confuse it further!

We bet before each show Samantha tells herself, “I am not going to screw up! I am not going to screw up!” But it’s only a matter of time before she introduces herself at the top of the show as “Screw up, my Harris is not Samantha name.” And then slaps herself in the forehead.

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