Dancing with the Stars: Season 35

Dancing with the Stars is about to kick off with a new season that will premiere on September 15th and September 16th of 2026, streaming live on ABC and on Disney+ with a two night event. Episode 1 will contain the female celebrities and episode 2 will have the male constants featuring an elimination.

  The hosts this year, Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough, will be introducing our pairs this year which are Julia Stiles & Ezra Sosa, Taylor Hanson with Britt Stewart, Tatyana Ali with Jan Ravnik, Jackson Olson with Emma Slater, Tyler Cameron with Sharna Burgess, Giada De Laurentiis with Alan Bersten, Jenna Dewan with Val Chmerkovskiy, Ezra French with Daniella Karagach, Ciara Miller with Brandon Armstrong, Sarah Jane Nader with Hailey Bills, Harry Shum Jr. with Jenna Johnson, Amber Glenn with Pasha Pashkov, Connor Wood with Rylee Arnold, Conner Leavitt with Adele Zaikmen, Maura Higgins with Mark Ballas, and Guillermo Rodriguez with Witney Carson. These are all wonderful contestants and they will do an excellent job this year. Our judges this year are Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough, and Bruno Tonioli and are all returning after the success from last year's season.

A recap of episodes 1 and 2 from season 35: After introducing the contestants and their partners, the producers chose to execute a surprise double elimination rather than a single elimination when the time arrived. This means that contestants Conner Leavitt and his partner Adele Zaikman were eliminated with a score of 12/30. Also our only same gender pairing contestants, Sarah Jane Nader and her partner Hailey Bills, were eliminated as well with a scoring of 14/30. Now the top scoring pairs were Harry Shum Jr. and his partner Jenna Johnson tying in scores with Maura Higgins and her partner Mark Ballas with a score of 21/30. However, during the live online voting system the service crashed and the majority of the votes got thrown out. Some people say that this isn't fair for the double elimination. Do we think that the producers should have waited to do a double elimination or do we think this was the right choice?

Image Courtesy of Serecki on Wikimedia Commons