"Bad news. Grumpy's back," said Len Goodman as the third week of Dancing With the Stars kicked off. The Season Nine dancers were favored with relatively friendly scoring last week with Goodman absent, but with his tough and sometimes eccentric grades as part of the mix on Monday, most of the performers had less to cheer about, as if learning the samba or rumba had not been enough of a pain.

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But one dancer seems impervious to Goodman's sniping, or to the rehearsal schedule, or to the Osmond fan club, or to anything else so far, and that's dance-pop singer Mya, who has now earned the honor of winning the first scores of 10 awarded in this season. Her rumba with Dmitry Chaplin had a ridiculous level of difficulty compared with the other dancers, with several intricate holds. Both Carrie Ann Inaba and Bruno Tonioli gave the effort a 10, but Goodman, who marked Mya way down back in the first week, demurred again and scored her as just a 7, saying that the choreography was too busy to properly show her off.

Dancing with the Stars through the seasons

One of the more endangered dancers, Debi Mazar, appealed for votes after her samba by saying that she's not a professional -- which could have been a shot at Mya. Mazar was in last week's bottom two, possibly due in part to a backlash against her studio back-and-forth with the always caustic Maksim Chmerkovskiy. In order to inspire his partner, Maks called on Season Five runner-up Mel B. to remind her that a low finish early on can be overcome. But the dance was deemed too safe by all the judges, and her overall score of 17 was the lowest any woman received. Without the fan base of the two men who fell apart (more on them later), Mazar may be in serious trouble..

Two other women pulled in behind Mya as the stars of the night. Natalie Coughlin still comes across as shy onstage and afraid to be sexy, so partner Alec Mazo brought in his wife Edyta Sliwinska to counsel her. Edyta knows just a wee bit about sexy, and her comments seemed to inspire Coughlin in the rumba. Her score of 26 put her second on the night, and coming in third at 23 was Joanna Krupa, who got plenty of assistance from partner Derek Hough, who used a rope to swing onto the stage. Her height seemed to give her some problems with the samba, but the judges are responding to her competitive drive. However, Krupa keeps getting undesirable spots near the start of the show, and one senses the brass doesn't have as much invested in her as they do in the Olympian Coughlin.

The male standouts of the first two weeks were again the highest scoring men, but neither Aaron Carter nor Donny Osmond approached Mya's level. Carter, who seems to be in a mood to gin up rumors of romances with various DWtS figures, lost some momentum Monday as the judges called him out for exaggerating his movements and losing his fluid motion during the rumba. It didn't help that he appeared to be wearing the kind of teensy robe they give you at a massage parlor. Osmond had his work cut out trying to look both sexy and Latin. He and Kym Johnson moved well enough, but it was way too tasteful to work as a rumba. Tonioli called the routine "airy-fairy," to which Osmond responded, in a likely first for that family, by trying to kiss the judge.

Louie Vito and Chelsie Hightower continue to be adorable, if not especially highly scored. Vito is clearly smitten with his partner, and both of them look several years younger than they are, so watching them is like being flipped over to some Disney Channel teen show in the middle of DWtS. He decided to slick back his hair for the rumba, making him look like an adult for the first time, and the studio audience loved the dance. But Goodman called him out for relying too much on Hightower, and his score of 5 pulled Vito down to a 20 overall -- still likely in the safe zone on Tuesday.

Kelly Osbourne is obviously being set up for a long run, whether her dancing justifies it or not. She once again got to close the show, and the storyline the producers have saddled her with -- can Kelly overcome crippling self-doubt? -- is exactly the thing that will rally viewers to her side. Her samba with Louis van Amstel was decent enough, with no glaring errors, and the crowd erupted when she was finished. Osbourne will almost certainly have outlasted a better dancer or two by the time we hit November.

Two dancers widely seen as darkhorses in the preseason are in danger of being forgotten completely. Melissa Joan Hart looked heavy on the floor in the first two weeks, but showed some improvement in her samba with Mark Ballas, who coaxed extra effort out of her. However, Hart scored just a 19 and is going to need some Sabrina magic to get much farther. Mark Dacascos seems to pick the steps up with little difficulty, but his rumba with Lacey Schwimmer was called "uncomfortable to watch" by Inaba, and all the judges accused him of lacking warmth.

The two men who scored lowest on the night have different issues right now. Tom DeLay is not technically skilled and Latin dancing will never be a good idea for him, but his immediate problem is that the pain in his feet has developed into stress fractures -- in both feet. He was virtually unable to rehearse and show doctors urged him to pull out, but while he may have resigned his seat in Congress, he ain't quittin' DWtS. His samba steps were ultra-simple, he threw in some crowd-pleasing hip shakes, and partner Cheryl Burke sold the routine with everything she had. DeLay got only a 15, but the judges were kind in their remarks, not wanting to provoke any more sympathy than he is already getting.

Michael Irvin's problems are that he doesn't seem to be taking the show that seriously, and he has a partner in newcomer Anna Demidova who is looking like she's in way over her head. A better partner could probably push Irvin, who didn't get to the Pro Football Hall of Fame without competitive fire, but Demidova concocted an elementary samba that prompted the harshest scores of the night, as Irvin got just a 4 from Goodman and a 14 overall. He might want to take a page from Chuck Liddell, who knows he has a limited lifespan on the show and is going to ham it up while he's there. He is way too large to samba effectively, but viewers will remember that he came onstage wearing silly ruffles on his sleeves and actually appeared to laugh during the dance. Tonioli called it a "samba from Zombietown," but I'll bet Liddell makes it to next week.

That's not a bet I am willing to make about Debi Mazar, however.

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