How ‘Dancing With the Stars’ got a new spring in its step

“Dancing With the Stars” has a new spring in its step.

The competition show, now in its 34th season on ABC, is seeing ratings it hasn’t reached in years. The semifinals show, which aired last week and featured a Prince theme, notched 7.22 million viewers, the highest for a semifinals episode since 2018.

Not only are more people watching, but they’re also voting in record numbers (fans cast 55.9 million votes last week, breaking the previous record set Nov. 11 during the show’s 20th anniversary episode) and talking about the show on social media.

Crucially, the show is also reaching younger demographics.

Not bad for a two-decade-old show, particularly one that has seen firsthand the changes in the broadcast TV business.

Because of that, the show has had to evolve. I’ve watched “Dancing With the Stars” over the better part of 18 years and seen the many adjustments it has made, including cutting down its format from twice-a-week shows to just one, an all-athletes shortened season in 2018, exclusively airing season 31 on Disney+ and the introduction of theme nights to the ballroom, like Taylor Swift, Motown, Disney and “Wicked.” The show, which was once only available via broadcast TV, can now also be watched on streaming platforms Disney+ and Hulu.

And of course, there’s been no shortage of colorful casting decisions over the years, whether with celebrities from other shows that air on ABC like “The Bachelor” or Disney Channel stars, Olympic athletes (particularly figure skaters and gymnasts), political figures like former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer and former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, or my personal favorite, astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Ahead of the finale Tuesday, I spoke with showrunner Conrad Green about how “Dancing With the Stars” is reaching audiences, how the concept of celebrity has changed since the show’s debut in 2005 and what this all says about the state of broadcast TV. Green has been with the show for years and served as its original showrunner, before stepping away and returning in 2022. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s behind the ratings highs this season for “Dancing With the Stars”?

It’s been a process, actually. For the last couple of seasons, it’s been growing. Last season was the first time we engaged this younger audience, and that kept growing through last season, and when we left last season, it’s always that question of, will people come back to us, or was it just a one-off? And they did come back.

It’s been largely a question of keeping our existing audience and then finding a new audience of 18- to 30-year-olds. That’s partly fed by social media. It’s partly fed by a desire to have communal TV viewing experiences. That was something everyone had with “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” 20 years ago, but TV doesn’t lend itself to that so much anymore, and I think a lot of people are discovering the fun of having those kind of communal viewing experiences.

You mentioned social media. Are you talking about the social media followings of the stars or the casting of influencers or others who are already pretty big on social media?

We’ve always tried to reflect the world of celebrity that we live in. And when a show reaches 20 years, there’s quite big changes in what that world is.

The world of celebrity has fundamentally changed. How people consume media has fundamentally changed, and so as a show, we have to work with that. So what was a celebrity in 2005, it’s a very different thing now. So we can have what would have been old-school celebrities who would have made sense back when we started 20 years ago, and then we can have people that never would have been a celebrity 20 years ago, but are far more important and engaging for a younger audience, who are largely online and largely living through social media in their entertainment.

The other part of it is trying to make sure we engage properly in social media, encouraging our couples to really embrace it. Loads of our younger audience have come to the show through watching clips on social media and thinking, “What is this?” So I think there’s a good feedback loop where you can end up having a new audience come to you who don’t necessarily watch much sit-down live television on a Tuesday night.

What’s the strategy to reach different audiences?

We’re basically now on every place you could want to find us. The point is, go where people watch TV, and put your TV show there. And I think it took some work to do that because it’s obviously hard to persuade affiliates that it is in their interest to do this, but I hope what it proves is that you don’t end up cannibalizing an audience from broadcast TV. You make a show much bigger and much more buzzy, and more people come. Everyone wins. And I see social media really as an extension of that.

Now, it’s not enough just to put out a big show on network TV and expect it to have the cultural impact it had, but across all of these different platforms and places, you can have that cultural impact.

What lessons does “Dancing With the Stars” have for how broadcast can transition to this new time? The cross-platform aspect is interesting.

There are many ways that we can work particularly well with social media and feel like a particularly current, buzzy show. Our dances are a minute long and spectacular with really high production values. Guess what? That should work on TikTok.

It’s also really helpful for us that our cast, particularly our dancers, do a lot on social media, which is constantly promoting the show. It helps that we’re a live show, so that you know the story is being written as we speak. It’s probably easier for live recurring shows to be able to try and generate that kind of interest because they’re an ongoing story.

How have you seen the show change over time?

If you look at show one, and you look at now, it feels like two completely different shows, almost. Apart from [judges] Bruno [Tonioli] and Carrie Ann [Inaba], pretty much everything else has changed. The scale of the show is dramatically different. But essentially, the storytelling is the same. I’ve always believed in incremental change. Bring your audience with you, keep improving bit by bit, season by season, but don’t tear up the playbook.

Stuff We Wrote

Film shoots

Number of the week

Universal Pictures’ “Wicked: For Good” conjured up $223 million in global box office revenue in its opening weekend, providing a jolt to an otherwise muted fall season at theaters.

The so-called holiday corridor between Thanksgiving and the end of the year has traditionally been a crucial driver for the box office, and this year is no exception. Studios and exhibitors are counting on big performances from tentpole films like “Wicked: For Good,” as well as Disney’s upcoming animated movie “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” to bolster 2025 theatrical revenue.

Finally …

Is that elusive futuristic vision of flying cars drawing nearer? My colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen wrote about an air taxi company that recently purchased control of the Hawthorne Municipal Airport for more than $125 million. They’re hoping to shuttle select passengers during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.