Newsweek Illustration/Getty Images/Getty Images
By Anna Rahmanan
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
There is something almost mischievous about putting Julia Stiles and a Savannah Bananas player in the same room and calling them both stars.
Yet when Dancing with the Stars unveiled its Season 35 cast, there they were: Stiles, the actor perennially associated with Save the Last Dance; baseball player Jackson Olson; The Rookie actor Jenna Dewan; chef Giada De Laurentiis; Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor Tatyana Ali; singer and ‘90s heartthrob Taylor Hanson; Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn; reality TV personalities Maura Higgins and Ciara Miller; Paralympian Ezra Frech; The Bachelorette star Tyler Cameron; Glee and Grey's Anatomy star Harry Shum Jr.; Jimmy Kimmel sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez; and TikTok-era comedians and creators.
It is an extremely 2026 collection of famous people, meaning almost nobody will recognize all of them.
Read More on TV
On Tuesday, they will start dancing when Season 35 premieres on September 15 and continues September 16, live on ABC and Disney+, before settling into its regular Tuesday schedule.
The cast list offers a small lesson in what has happened to American culture. There was once a reasonably coherent national answer to the question: who is a celebrity? Dancing with the Stars, which premiered in 2005, has survived long enough to watch that consensus disappear.
Its solution? Producers realized that the show no longer needs everybody to know its stars. It needs everybody to know somebody.
The Coalition Is the Cast
Casting director Deena Katz and executive producer Conrad Green have been assembling versions of this peculiar dinner party for years. The objective is a room filled with folks living different kinds of fame.
Green described the formula after last season: Katz, he said, builds casts that can appeal to the show’s older viewers and its newer Gen Z audience at the same time.
Season 35 makes the strategy very visible. Someone who watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as it aired can show up for Ali. Someone whose teenage years contained “MMMBop” and whose nostalgic flair defines TV viewing habits gets Hanson. Bachelor Nation, always a staple on every season, gets Cameron. Foodies get De Laurentiis. TikTok obsessives get Connor Wood, while sports fans get Glenn and Frech.
The lineup resembles less a traditional television cast than a coalition map.
Think about it: modern entertainment has become remarkably good at serving niches, and algorithms can give a viewer precisely the music, comedy, politics or reality-show microdrama that viewer already likes. Dancing with the Stars does something more old-fashioned and, given the time we live in, pretty revolutionary: it gathers those niches into the same brightly lit ballroom and makes them sit through one another. Well, dance with each other.
The trick appears to be working. The Season 34 finale drew 9.24 million viewers in preliminary live-plus-same-day figures, its biggest finale audience in nine years. ABC said more than 72 million votes were cast that night, while the show posted its strongest finale performance among adults 18 to 34 in 14 years.
A television antique had somehow acquired young voters.
Winning Your Base Gets You Only So Far
But at a point, the politics becomes more interesting.
Every Dancing with the Stars contestant effectively arrives with a constituency. The Bachelorette contestant has voters from the franchise fandom, for example, while the Paralympian will likely benefit from a devoted fanbase of sports aficionados. The nostalgic actor, on the other hand, has people delighted to discover that someone they loved in 1999 is now attempting a foxtrot.
That constituency can get a candidate onto the floor, but winning the season requires an expansion.
Related Story
The ‘Real Housewives’ Theory of Trump’s GOP
The program literally combines popular support with institutional judgment as viewer votes are combined with judges’ scores to determine who is vulnerable to elimination. The metaphor should probably stop before Carrie Ann Inaba becomes the Senate parliamentarian, but the underlying challenge is familiar from electoral politics: a devoted base matters, but eventually successful competitors (read: politicians) have to persuade people who didn't arrive caring about them to care about them.
That requires a kind of weekly retail politics. Contestants acquire biographies, setbacks, running jokes and visible improvement. Their professional partners introduce them to an electorate that may have had no previous reason to notice them. The celebrity becomes less important than the campaign and the partner.
Needless to say, social media has intensified the logistics. Green has said the show’s recent growth came partly from finding younger viewers online, while preserving its existing audience. After Season 34, he credited celebrities' and professional dancers' social media activity with helping the program reach a younger generation. Even now, before the show has even premiered, viewers are forwarding Stiles’ practice sessions to each other on Instagram (will she delight us with that Save the Last Dance routine? We sure hope so).
The result is a rare piece of mass entertainment whose fragmentation is an asset: each fandom supplies an entrance, and the ballroom supplies the common space. The result is very much the kind of kumbaya moments that no one in politics has yet been able to replicate.
America Is Still Allowed to Disagree
Regarding the politics of it all: a ballroom competition is obviously entertainment, whereas elections distribute power. Nobody’s health insurance depends on whether Bruno Tonioli likes a cha-cha.
Nor is Dancing With the Stars some untouched civic commons. The show has generated political controversy before, and celebrity itself has become increasingly tribal. Its resurgence can also be explained without reaching for political theory: smart casting, TikTok clips, nostalgia and a durable competition format are a formidable television recipe.
The people who make the program offer something close to that explanation themselves: Green has said its success rests on casting that connects generations, along with storytelling, effort and goodwill. Katz described each pairing as a potential story, assembled according to what audiences might want to watch.
Still, the show’s ability to make those stories coexist is worth noticing and, perhaps, emulating.
American mass culture increasingly asks people to sort themselves before they enter: choose a podcast! A streamer! An influencer! A political identity! But what if those divisions were reasons to find each other in the same room, instead of visiting different palaces?
On Dancing with the Stars, you may tune in to watch De Laurentiis bust a move, while your kid is excited to see Wood from the TikTok videos that have made him familiar to a younger generation. But somehow, you may both end up invested in Glenn’s transition from figure skating to dance.
By the finale, the question will no longer be who is your star but who won you over?
That may be the little piece of political wisdom hiding underneath all those rhinestones: in a country where shared culture is harder to come by, Dancing with the Stars does not require Americans to agree on whom they care about before the contest begins.
It gives them a reason to keep watching long enough to change their minds and, perhaps, decide to sign up for ballroom lessons in the fall.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines