The world has changed around “Dancing With the Stars” since the competition series became a hit after its 2005 premiere. Though producers have periodically experimented with casting, canned hosts and tweaked the elimination process, the heart of the show — pairs of professional dancers and celebrities performing weekly and facing elimination based on scores from judges and fan votes — has remained intact.
That formula meant “D.W.T.S.” had an audience with a median age of 63.5 in 2022. But in the past two seasons — after almost 20 years and 500 episodes — the show has grabbed hold of Gen Z viewers through its canny use of TikTok, casting of younger dance pros and the chance virality of “wow moments” from routines.
“We’ve kind of hit this tipping point where now we feed TikTok, TikTok feeds back to us,” said Conrad Green, the showrunner.
Ahead of the Season 33 semifinals, Green and two of the show’s professional dancers, Rylee Arnold, 19, and Witney Carson, 31, explained their parts in making “Dancing With the Stars” a hit with Gen Z.
Charli D’Amelio was an influencer contestant for the streaming era.
In 2022, Disney execs removed “Dancing With the Stars” from network TV, making it available only via the Disney+ streaming app, a move aimed at drawing older viewers to the service, which predominantly catered to children from the ages 2 to 17.
That plan didn’t last — “D.W.T.S.” returned to ABC a year later — but that Season 31 experiment yielded two keys to the show’s future. Green, who had been showrunner for Seasons 1 through 18, returned and Charli D’Amelio, an 18-year-old TikTok creator, was cast as a celebrity contestant.
“That brought a lot of younger audience to watch the show on Disney+,” Green said.
D’Amelio and her partner Mark Ballas, 38, won the Season 31 Mirrorball Trophy by leveraging their chemistry, dancing ability, and her 140 million TikTok followers at the time. (She’s up to 155 million now.) Their very first routine, for example, referenced her participation in that year’s dance trend on the platform; viewers of the ABC show reposted the performance back to TikTok.
Rylee Arnold and Harry Jowsey brought their TikTok following.
The next season, Rylee Arnold, 19, was hired as one of the show’s professionals and paired with the reality television star and TikTok personality Harry Jowsey, 27. Arnold, who had danced on the franchise’s “Juniors” spinoff, was already a native social user.
“I feel like in the start of the season they would see me making TikToks and they’d be like, ‘what is she doing?’” Arnold said. Production started to notice the influence it had when Arnold and Jowsey would be voted to the next week over and over, despite judges handing them low scores. They finished Season 32 in sixth place.
“It wasn’t our dancing that took us far,” she said. She added: “People voted for us across America because we were sharing things online and sharing the whole experience to everybody.” The pair would post behind the scenes footage of their dance rehearsals, what they ate after practice and dance trends.
A slew of her TikToks with Jowsey and with her Season 33 partner, Stephen Nedoroscik, have more than six million views.
Green noted that Arnold’s knack for drawing her own audience has turned her into something of a consultant to other celebrities and dancers on the show. “In the past, you might have done, you know, lots of press appearances and things like that. But TikTok is absolutely a nailed-on way of reaching people who are going to be engaged in your process.”
Anna Delvey turned “Nothing” into something.
“D.W.T.S.” has since its start tried to showcase a diverse range of contestants, especially delighting in having fiery and prickly personalities like the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer and the boxer Floyd Mayweather don sequins and dance the cha-cha.
This season’s astringent personality, Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress convicted of larceny and theft known as Anna Delvey, was more recognizable to a younger audience. When she got eliminated during the second week of the show, hosts asked what she would take away from her experience. Her reply — “nothing” — went viral online and her professional partner, Ezra Sosa, took the bit as far as getting “nothing” tattooed on his shoulder — and documenting it on TikTok, of course. Sosa’s reaction shots to judge’s scoring have also gripped online audiences.
Since elimination, Sosa has taken on an unofficial role of “D.W.T.S.” gossip, filming videos and pressing professional dancers and their celebrity partners, like Gleb Savchenko and Brooks Nader, about their relationship status.
Influencers like Olivia Jade Giannulli and Lele Pons have continued to proliferate among the celebrity invitees, and the show has had Disney stars like Xochitl Gomez and Chandler Kinney compete. Ilona Maher and Stephen Nedoroscik, Olympians who spun internet gold during the 2024 Summer Games, have also helped capture the chronically online.
Producers learned that everything is content.
These days on set, producers are focusing as much on shooting for other platforms as they do for TV. The “D.W.T.S.” social media team comes into rehearsals every day to capture content, like a behind the scenes blooper reel that currently has over 6 million views on the show’s official TikTok. Staffers also post videos and pictures to social media on show days to encourage fan voting.
For the show’s 500th episode, which aired last week, two of the professional dancers who have been eliminated this season — Emma Slater and Ezra Sosa — went live on the official “D.W.T.S.” TikTok page during the second half of the episode, when they showed behind the scenes of couples rehearsing, reactions in the ballroom and live commentated on an instant dance challenge.
Green sees the use of social media as a “virtuous circle”: Though the each episode runs two hours, the dance performances are a minute long — about the average length of a TikTok video.
Viral performance moments give a lift.
This season’s unexpected front-runner pairing is Danny Amendola, the former New England Patriots receiver, and Witney Carson, a pro in her 13th season. The pair have gotten lots of praise from judges and viewers alike for their choreography, but their routines have a life outside the show, too.
In Week 5, the duo performed a contemporary piece to “Unsteady” by X Ambassadors that became an instant sensation. In it, Amendola lifts Carson from the floor, pulling her up by an ankle. People tried to recreate the move in TikTok posts; on the @dwtsofficial TikTok page, the video of the dance has over 12 million views.
“We really didn’t know until we were scrolling on TikTok that everybody was doing it,” Carson said.
The former “Bachelor” star Joey Graziadei spawned a similar wave of recreations on the show’s Disney-themed night. While performing the samba to a song from “Tarzan” with his partner Jenna Johnson, Graziadei pantomimed playing the drums on Johnson’s body as she smoothly laid on her stomach on beat. TikTok users made their best attempts.
And while these viral moments help the show, Carson said she doesn’t choreograph with that in mind. Instead, she tries to create “wow moments” in her dances, which become viral as a happy accident. “I’m thinking about the audience thinking ‘this could be a really great moment’ in every single routine that I do.”
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