Dancing With the Stars: Maks is Leaving the Show!!

I felt my heart sink when I found this article on TVGude.com. One of my favorite two pro dancers on Dancing With the Stars (along with hottie Tony Dovolani) is hunk Maksim Chmerkovskiy and now I find that he won’t be back on the show for season 6. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

This may break a million hearts, but Dancing with the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy says he won’t be returning for Season 6 in March. “The 25 million viewers are going to remember me whether I’m there or not,” says Chmerkovskiy, who hopes to return to professional ballroom competition and is busy over the holidays choreographing a New Year’s Eve show at the Wynn Las Vegas.

Chmerkovskiy, 27, says he’s had a great time over the past four seasons teaching celebrities like Spice Girl Mel B. and boxing champ Laila Ali how to dance. But he’s impatient to become a student again himself. “Other dancers on this show have aspirations to become actors and singers and they lose focus of where they came from,” says Maks. “The second you close that door and stop educating yourself? You stop developing.”

(follow the jump for the rest)

Maks’ continuing education, he says, will involve bringing to this country a fantastic Russian dancer “who I personally want to dance with,” he says. “We’re going to start practicing. I want to go back to my coaches, to learning.”

The fact that so many viewers care about his future just underscores the fact that this was the year that the Dancing pros finally came into their own. In this fifth season, some of them — notably Maks, Cheryl Burke, Julianne Hough and Edyta Sliwinska — were more famous than some of the celebrities on the show’s roster, including models Albert Reed and Josie Maran.

But Maks says that instead of falling in love with Hollywood and all its trappings, the celebrity spotlight turned him off. “This is a very lucrative world,” he says. “And I spent some time here just looking around and going, ‘Wow, this is an amazing house.’ But I’m a very analytical person. And right away, I looked past the curtains and I saw the drugs and the difficult lifestyles and the failed marriages. And I saw absolutely no family values — and that is the most important thing.”

Maks, who is single, is quick to point out that his last two partners — both married — are not included in that description. “It’s really important to me to maintain the relationship after the show,” he says. “With Laila, I love her. But it didn’t work because she’s a very private, very reserved person. But this season, with Mel, this is a person I’ll be able to call any time and say, ‘Hey, I’m in town. Let’s have dinner.’”

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