The Hottest Show on TV Is 20 Years Old

It’s only appropriate that Dancing With the Stars devoted an entire night to Wicked last week, because this year, the show’s ratings and buzz are defying gravity in the most spectacular ways. At a time when double-digit declines are the norm for linear shows, ABC’s variety-competition staple kicked off its 34th season in September by scoring its biggest premiere numbers since 2020 — and then proceeded to grow its viewership for five consecutive weeks, something no fall show has done since the modern Nielsen-measurement era began in 1991. Even more stunning is what’s powering the DWTS ratings boom: massive gains among Gen Z and younger millennial viewers, two demographics that had supposedly abandoned linear TV.

A cast packed with lots of social-media influencers, Mormon wives, and one particularly adorable late-night sidekick has certainly helped woo the under-35 set. But Dancing’s dominant performance this fall actually has its roots in a move ABC and its parent company, Disney, made back in early 2023. That’s when Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden, just a few months into her new role overseeing both streaming and linear TV, abruptly reversed a decision made by her predecessors to pull DWTS from ABC’s lineup and make it a Disney+ digital exclusive.

Instead, Walden convinced ABC’s affiliate stations to sign on to a new arrangement that would bring the BBC Studios–produced show back to network TV and allow it to be simulcast live on Disney+ as well as available the next day on Hulu. Younger audiences who don’t pay for cable or know what an antenna is would continue to have access to the DWTS ballroom, while the millions who had watched for years on ABC would get their favorite show back. Instead of buying into the Peak Streaming Wars delusions of the early 2020s that saw old-school media companies loot their linear properties to compete with the Netflixes of the world, Walden and her team decided that, in this case at least, they didn’t need to choose between platforms.

The result has been a resurgence of viewership and buzz for DWTS, making it the poster child for “what broadcast television can and should be in this modern era,” according to ABC Entertainment senior vice-president for content strategy and scheduling Ari Goldman. “So much of the narrative with linear ratings over the last decade has been missing the larger point that younger viewers want to watch these shows,” he says. “So by making the show available live on Disney+, and to also have it next day on Hulu and Disney+, and to have it on ABC and ABC On Demand — anyone can watch it.”

And watch it they are:

➼ Six weeks in, DWTS is averaging roughly 6 million same-day viewers on ABC and Disney+ every Tuesday night, up 19 percent versus the same period last year (4.95 million) and 24 percent versus 2023 (4.78 million), per Nielsen. Add in viewers who watch via DVR or on demand (either on Hulu or Disney+), and early Nielsen data has the DWTS audience well over 8 million viewers every week, and likely to trend higher by season’s end.

➼ The biggest gains for DWTS this season are coming among younger viewers. The show is averaging a 1.35 rating with adults under 35, up an eye-popping 118 percent versus a year ago (0.62) and more than triple its 2023 average at this point in the season (0.39). Among adults under 50, DWTS is averaging a 1.21 rating, up 70 percent versus its ratings at this point last year. And this isn’t some one-season fluke: Last fall, the show notched double-digit demo increases versus its 2023 averages as well.

➼ Dancing With the Stars is now the most-watched unscripted reality show on TV, handily outdrawing NBC’s The Voice (4.9 million, 0.32) and CBS’s Survivor (4.2 million, 0.61) in both total viewers and adults under 50. That’s a big change from fall 2021, the last time DWTS aired on linear without a live stream on Disney+. “The Voice and Survivor were ahead of Dancing four years ago in same-day, adults 18–49 viewership, and we are now close to four times bigger than The Voice and twice as big as Survivor,” Goldman says. “It’s one of the more dramatic, eye-popping transformations that I’ve ever witnessed as a research person in this industry.”

➼ This influx of Gen-Z viewers has transformed the overall composition of DWTS’s audience, both on ABC and streaming (Disney+/Hulu): 15 percent of its ABC viewership is adults under 35, up from 9 percent a year ago. While most established unscripted hits on rival networks are getting grayer, DWTS has seen its median age decline by two full years since 2023. “If you look back ten years ago, Dancing With the Stars was the oldest-skewing show on ABC,” Goldman says. “It is now, just on the ABC side, our second-youngest show.”

➼ The youth surge is even more pronounced on streaming. Disney says the median age of digital viewers for DWTS has dropped a whopping eight years, from 45 to 37, in just one season, while the median age of a viewer who watches the DWTS livestream every Tuesday night on Disney+ is just 28, according to Goldman.

That last stat is particularly impressive when you consider Netflix and other streamers have spent the better part of a decade training younger viewers to gorge ten hours of a show on their own schedule rather than tune in every week at the same time for new episodes. “So for a lot of these 20- and 30-year-old viewers, Dancing With the Stars is perhaps the first live, shared viewing experience that they’ve had with a TV series in their lives,” Goldman says. “I think we’ve proven there is still a fierce appetite for the communal viewing experience.” And advertisers have noticed: Last week’s Wicked Night on DWTS — which included appearances by the movie’s leads, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and director — was the result of a paid product-integration deal with Comcast-owned Universal Pictures, which used the Disney show as a key element in its marketing of November’s Wicked: For Good.

While making the live version of DWTS available to cord-cutters and cord-nevers via Disney+ has clearly been pivotal to the 20-year-old show’s ratings boom, it’s not the only contributing factor. When it returned to network TV in 2023, ABC opted to schedule DWTS on Tuesday night rather than its longtime perch on Monday. Though it’s often risky to move an established show from a successful time slot, in this case, Goldman says the shift came with some major upsides: DWTS no longer had to face two full hours of The Voice most weeks, nor did it have to compete with football on ESPN (or deal with preemptions from local ABC stations that might have local broadcast rights to games). “To have that lack of competition on this night and to be able to avoid that football issue, it’s been really helpful for us to plant the flag on Tuesday,” Goldman says.

And yet, Goldman is also quick to acknowledge that none of those strategic maneuvers would matter much if the show’s creative team hadn’t also figured out the formula for making a live show that appeals to 2025 audiences, particularly the hard-to-reach Gen-Z crowd. “You can make content available on any number of platforms, but it doesn’t mean people will choose to watch it,” Goldman says. “The show is the thing that matters.”

Goldman points to the efforts of DWTS executive producer Conrad Green and casting director Deena Katz, who, working with Disney unscripted chief Rob Mills, essentially implemented a soft reboot of the series back in 2022, when the series made its Disney+ debut and, not so coincidentally, Green returned as showrunner after a nearly decadelong absence. “Over the last few years, they’ve really understood this new social-media environment that we’re in and the interest among younger viewers in dancing content,” Goldman says. “The show was always really great at getting a cornucopia of celebrities and headline-grabbing names, but I think now you really have this willingness to embrace the younger demographic and the type of content that they’re choosing to consume on social.”

The decision to lean in on Gen-Z tastes has been obvious this season with theme nights built around TikTok dances and the movie version of Wicked, as well as a cast stacked with influencers and red-hot reality show personalities, including Whitney Leavitt and Jen Affleck from another Disney reality show, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. But it has also played out behind the scenes. As Vulture reported last month, one of the reasons Andy Richter has lasted as long on the show has been because of his embrace of TikTok, which he and partner Emma Slater use to promote both DWTS and themselves, offering audiences a chance to preview each week’s dances before they air. Green has singled it out as one of the reasons for the show’s ratings gains. “We’ve kind of hit this tipping point where now we feed TikTok, TikTok feeds back to us,” he told the New York Times last year.

For Goldman, one of the most satisfying things about the audience growth is that it hasn’t come at the expense of ABC’s core internal constituency: local affiliates. These stations pay Disney hundreds of millions each year to carry ABC programming, but Disney’s pivot to streaming in 2019 has resulted in plenty of tension by shifting resources away from broadcast. It’s also why the move to simulcast DWTS on both ABC and Disney+ took some negotiating: Walden and her team needed to get affiliates to agree to share the exclusive live window for the show, much like NBC did in 2021 when it started livestreaming Saturday Night Live on Peacock.

But while station owners no doubt had some worries about surrendering audience to streaming, Goldman says DWTS’s gains are proof that the two ecosystems can complement each other. “We are not hurting our affiliates one bit by having this additional exposure on Disney+,” he says. “If anything, the evidence suggests we are bringing more people back to this show, and there’s a halo that spreads across all of our platforms … While there’s meteoric growth on streaming, we’re also seeing a younger audience increase on linear for the ABC stations, excluding the streaming component.”

Given this success, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that Disney and ABC were considering ways to expand the franchise — particularly since it wasn’t that long ago that the show aired two editions per year and aired two nights per week. Even now, Strictly Come Dancing — the BBC show on which DWTS is based — still airs twice a week, with both a performance and results show. But if any such expansion plans are in the works, Goldman isn’t letting on. “I think at the moment we are just so happy with the performance of Dancing once a year,” he says. “So while, sure, there’s certainly a part of my thinking that’s like, Let’s do the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? thing, and let’s run this all over the place and just generate ratings all over the schedule, I actually think it makes the series feel that much more special to have a once-a-year fall presence. It really has become event television every Tuesday.”