Tom Bergeron Is Returning to Dancing With the Stars
Dancing With the Stars’s rising tide is really lifting all boats, even ones that left port years ago. Tom Bergeron is returning to DWTS years after he and the show broke up on bad terms over Sean Spicer. “It feels really good,” Bergeron said on Tuesday’s Good Morning America. “I’m really looking forward to it.” He’ll be a guest judge next week during the show’s 20th anniversary special. Bergeron said it was showrunner and executive producer Conrad Green’s idea to invite Bergeron back to the ballroom. “Twenty years of any primetime show is amazing,” Bergeron said. “For a show 20 years old to also be having the ratings resurgence as they are, you’re more likely to see a zebra playing the piano than for that to happen. I really think it’s a credit to my buddy [Green] and team kind of getting it back to its essence.”
Bergeron was the host of Dancing With the Stars from its inception in 2005 through 2019. He and the show publicly feuded when Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer was cast in season 28. On Cheryl Burke’s podcast, Bergeron said he’d had a lunch with producers to discuss the next season, and his opinion that it should be an oasis from politics. “And then a few weeks later, I get a phone call,” he continued. “And they run down the list of who is going to be on the show, and this former showrunner says to me, ‘You might want to sit down for this last one.’ And then they told me who it was, the former press guy for Trump. I said, ‘Guys, this is exactly what we said we wouldn’t do. Don’t go there. This is not the right time, play to our strengths, be the show that gives people a break from all this bullshit.” In response to Spicer’s casting, Bergeron released a statement lamenting that the show wouldn’t be a “joyful respite from ANY party affiliations.” He told Burke “at that moment, I knew this is probably my last season, because of that one betrayal.” Now that the producer who betrayed him has been fired, Bergeron can come back to his shiny-floored home.
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