Dancing with the Stars Season 34 recently premiered, igniting several questions from both the series’ present and past. One of the questions that has surfaced is why Tom Bergeron was fired. Bergeron hosted DWTS between 2005 and 2019 until his firing from the dance competition show in 2020. While viewers are aware he was fired, some are still wondering why it happened.
So why was Tom Bergeron fired from Dancing with the Stars? Here’s Tom Bergeron’s DWTS firing explained.
Here’s why Tom Bergeron was fired from Dancing with the Stars
Tom Bergeron was fired from Dancing with the Stars after he opposed the show’s casting of Sean Spicer, Donald Trump‘s former White House Press Secretary.
Bergeron opened up about his firing in a 2023 appearance on Cheryl Burke’s Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast. He revealed it all started in summer 2019, when he had lunch with DWTS’s showrunner and the showrunner’s boss.
The former Hollywood Squares host shared that he urged them not to cast any political figures on the show due to the divisive political climate at the time. He explained he wanted the show to be a “wonderful escape from all that divisiveness for two hours a week” (via The Hollywood Reporter). Bergeron then discussed the call he got two weeks after the meetings, where he learned Sean Spicer was cast, despite their discussions.
“And I said, ‘Guys, this is exactly what we said we wouldn’t do!,” Bergeron recalled. He added that he would have responded the same way if they cast Hilary Clinton, whom he voted for president. Bergeron was furious about the producers’ decision, so much so that he offered to step away for a season. However, the producers countered with an offer to release him from his contract.
“It really pissed me off … my temper kicked in,” he shared. “I was at least going to let people know that they f***ing lied to me.” Notably, Bergeron had written a statement on X (formerly Twitter) in 2019, criticizing Dancing with the Stars’ casting of Sean Spicer.
Bergeron discussed the statement he wrote, where he stressed that he did not name any political figures. He acknowledged that they threw him a “curveball,” but concluded that the producers were entitled to do what they did. “We will have to agree to disagree,” he further stated. He admitted he knew at the time of writing the statement that his current season would be his last.
Previously, in a 2020 interview with reporters at ABC’s VirtuFall panel, executive producer Andrew Llinares stated that Bergeron and Erin Andrews’ firing was due to the show’s “evolution” (via US Weekly).
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