LOS ANGELES
There is a particular kind of television show that is supposed to age quietly. It runs for two decades, accumulates a loyal audience that skews older every year, gets renewed out of habit, and eventually ends with a respectful press release.
Somebody forgot to tell “Dancing with the Stars.”
Season 35 begins tonight at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+, the first half of a two-night premiere that concludes Wednesday. It arrives off the back of a season that did something nobody in television expected a 21-year-old competition format to do: it grew, loudly, and largely because of people who were not born when it debuted.
The Numbers That Changed the Conversation
Season 34 was not a modest uptick. Its premiere climbed to 8.13 million viewers across ABC, Hulu, Disney+ and digital within three days — a streaming high for the series — and its finale drew 9.24 million total viewers with a 2.15 rating among adults 18-49, the largest finale audience in nine years.
The voting figures are stranger still. The Season 34 premiere logged 21 million fan votes, a 163 percent jump on the previous season’s eight million. By the finale, the season had accumulated 72 million votes in total, and the eventual winners — Robert Irwin and professional partner Witney Carson — received more votes than any competitor in the show’s history. For a format that spent much of the 2010s being politely described as “still on,” that is a resurrection with receipts.
How a Ballroom Show Became a TikTok Show
The mechanism behind the revival is not mysterious, though it is easy to underestimate. “Dancing with the Stars” is built from exactly the raw material that short-form video wants: a two-minute performance with a clear beginning and end, real physical stakes, visible improvement week over week, and a cast of people who are being genuinely, visibly terrified on camera.
Casting has followed the audience rather than the other way around. Recent seasons have leaned into creators, athletes and reality personalities with existing online constituencies, and those constituencies vote. The result is a feedback loop: a clip goes wide on Tuesday night, new viewers arrive Wednesday to understand the context, and the show’s live-plus-three numbers swell in a way linear television almost never does anymore.
It also helps that live, voted television is now a rarity. In an ecosystem of algorithmic recommendations and binge drops, a show that must be watched on a specific evening in order to influence an outcome has recovered a scarcity value it did not have to work for.
The Class of Season 35
This season’s lineup, revealed on “Good Morning America,” is characteristically unclassifiable. Actresses Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles headline the recognizable-name contingent. Chef Giada De Laurentiis brings the food-television audience. Taylor Hanson arrives with three decades of pop history and a fanbase that has never once needed encouragement to mobilize.
Tatyana Ali covers the nineties-sitcom affection vote. Reality figures Maura Higgins, Ciara Miller and Tyler Cameron bring the online engagement the format now runs on. And then there is Jackson Olson of the Savannah Bananas, the exhibition baseball team whose entire sporting proposition is choreography — arguably the least fair casting in the show’s history.
Announced pairings include Stiles with Ezra Sosa, Dewan with Val Chmerkovskiy, Ali with Jan Ravnik, Hanson with Britt Stewart and De Laurentiis with Alan Bersten. The professional roster also marks the return of Sharna Burgess, who has not competed since Season 30, alongside two new pros.
Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough co-host. Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli and Derek Hough judge.
Why Two Nights?
The premiere splits by gender: male celebrities dance Tuesday, female celebrities Wednesday, with each couple appearing only once across the two episodes. It is a scheduling decision that does two useful things at once.
First, it gives every pairing a full segment rather than a rushed ninety seconds, which matters enormously in a season where half the cast will be judged on their first impression by people who have never watched the show before. Second, it doubles the premiere’s footprint — two nights of clips, two nights of social conversation, two entry points for a new viewer.
It is also, quietly, a vote of confidence. Networks do not hand a returning series two hours of premiere real estate unless they expect the audience to show up for both.
What to Watch For
A few things are worth tracking beyond the obvious question of who can actually dance.
The first is whether the ratings surge holds. Resurgences in television are frequently one-season phenomena driven by a single breakout contestant; the honest test of Season 34’s success is whether Season 35 opens near it rather than reverting to the mean.
The second is the voting system itself. Seventy-two million votes across a season is an enormous engagement figure, but it also concentrates power in the most organized fanbases — which is why long-tenured pop acts and creators with devoted audiences have become such valuable casting. Whether the judges’ scores can still meaningfully counterbalance that is an open question the show has not fully answered.
The third is simply craft. Underneath the format mechanics is a genuine skill acquisition story: adults with no dance training learning, on a one-week turnaround, to execute a Viennese waltz in front of ten million people. When the show works, that is why.
The Case for Watching
“Dancing with the Stars” has never pretended to be prestige television and is better for it. What it offers is something increasingly scarce: an hour of broadcast in which the outcome is not predetermined, the effort is real, the failure is visible, and the whole thing resolves in a single evening.
That it is currently posting its best numbers in nearly a decade says less about nostalgia than about appetite. There is still an audience for watching people try something hard, badly, and then slightly less badly, in public, on a Tuesday.
The mirrorball is up. The first sequin goes on tonight.
