'Dancing With the Stars' season 35 premiere draws biggest audience in six years

"Dancing With the Stars" opened its 35th season this week to the largest live audience the ABC franchise has drawn in six years, a ratings jump that lands at a pointed moment for broadcast television, as networks continue to lose ground to streaming and reality competition programming faces new scrutiny over its long-term viability.

Night one of the two-night premiere event, which aired Tuesday and continued Wednesday on ABC and Disney+, drew 6.67 million total viewers, according to preliminary Nielsen data cited in an official release from Disney's entertainment press office. That figure represents a 24 percent increase over the season 34 premiere a year earlier and is the show's biggest premiere audience since season 29 in 2020.

The numbers

Among adults 18-49, the demographic advertisers pay the most to reach, the premiere posted a 1.48 rating, up 40 percent from the prior year's 1.06 and the strongest showing for a "Dancing With the Stars" opener in nine years. The season also delivered its best premiere rating among women 18-34 in thirteen years, a 2.53, according to the same release. ABC's broadcast finished as the number-one show of the night across all of television, beating its closest competitor, NBC's "America's Got Talent," by 51 percent in total viewers and by a wider margin in the adult demo.

The two-night structure was itself new. Sixteen celebrity-and-professional pairings were split across the two episodes, with the male contestants performing Tuesday and the women following on Wednesday, a scheduling change the network detailed in a release earlier this month as part of an expanded rollout for the season. Each pairing danced to a number-one song from the celebrity's birth year, a format twist meant to give the opener a stronger narrative hook than the usual scored-and-eliminated structure.

How the show got here

The premiere numbers extend a recovery that began last season, after several years in which "Dancing With the Stars" — like most linear reality competition programming — shed viewers steadily as audiences migrated to streaming. Season 34, which aired last September, itself outperformed expectations enough that the series earned a nomination for outstanding reality competition program at this year's Primetime Emmy Awards, its first nomination in that category in a decade, competing against "Survivor," "Top Chef," "The Traitors" and "RuPaul's Drag Race."

Executive producer Conrad Green, in an interview published by TVLine ahead of the premiere, described the show's usual seasonal arc and why last year broke from it.

"Usually, there's a kind of hammock with ratings. With the premiere, people tend to tune in, and then it'll soften a bit, then build back up to the finale. And last season, it just kept going up." — Conrad Green, executive producer

Green has also been candid about the show's casting strategy, telling TVLine that contestants need to be "passionate" about competing because a live broadcast leaves nowhere to hide a reluctant participant: "On a live TV show, you can't really hide if someone's doing it because their agent told them to, and they're not happy to be there." That approach shaped this season's roster, which producers announced earlier this month as the largest cast since seasons 9 and 31.

Who is on the season, and who is affected

The season 35 cast, competing for the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy, includes actresses Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles, chef Giada De Laurentiis, "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" alum Tatyana Ali, singer Taylor Hanson, Paralympic sprinter Ezra Frech, Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn, and reality-television personalities including Tyler Cameron and Maura Higgins. Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli return as judges, with Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough again hosting.

The season also carries two milestones tied to the professional dancers: Witney Carson is competing roughly four months into a pregnancy, a first for the franchise, and the roster includes an Olympic and a Paralympic champion — Glenn and Frech — competing in the same season for the first time. Beyond the individual storylines, the ratings matter most directly to ABC's ad-sales business and to Disney+, which has folded the broadcast into its own slate as the fourth consecutive season to stream the show alongside its network run, part of the company's broader push to use live, appointment-viewing programming to drive engagement across both platforms at once.

Trade coverage framed the premiere as evidence that live, communal television formats retain pulling power even as scripted dramas and prestige limited series increasingly debut to streaming-only audiences that networks cannot measure the same way. Deadline reported that the premiere was the most-watched entertainment telecast among adults 18-49 across all of television since ABC's broadcast of the Oscars earlier this year, a comparison the trade outlet used to underline how unusual the audience size was for a non-awards-season entertainment program. Variety's coverage similarly noted the show's improved standing relative to its competition on the same night.

What happens next

The immediate test, per Green's own framing, is whether season 35 can sustain its premiere audience through the "hammock" or continue last year's unusual trajectory of building toward the finale rather than dipping in the middle. Night two of the premiere, spotlighting the female contestants, aired Wednesday, with the results episode and first elimination expected in the days following as Nielsen finalizes same-day and multi-platform figures that typically add several hundred thousand additional viewers once delayed viewing is factored in. The season's live shows continue weekly on ABC and Disney+ into the fall, running alongside the network's push to promote the newly launched spinoff "Dancing With the Stars: The Next Pro," which is feeding new professional dancers into the main competition's talent pool. Whether the audience gains prove durable will not be clear until Nielsen's numbers roll in over the next several weeks, but for one night at least, the ballroom outdrew nearly everything else on American television.