DWTS Finale and Season 34’s Secret to Success: TikTok and Casting

After 20 years on air, Dancing With the Stars made a comeback like no other veteran television program with their 34th season.

Ratings are through the roof. Audience interaction is at an all-time high. Viewership has only increased week after week. All this success begs the legitimate question of how the once-struggling reality show for has-been celebrities reinvented itself and became a pop-cultural phenomenon that any public figure would be lucky to utilize as their re-introduction into the zeitgeist. 

Showrunner Conrad Green and executive producer-casting director Deena Katz both tell The Hollywood Reporter the secret to their success stems from maintaining the show’s core elements while evolving to modern demands. 

“When I came back to the show, my first thing was to say, let’s consolidate our existing audience and make sure the show feels like what they’re familiar with,” said Green, who worked on the show in its original iteration until exiting after season 17 and returning for season 33. “The next bit was then, let’s outreach and try and get as broad an audience as we can.”

A few factors have boosted the resurgence of DWTS, and one of those is undoubtedly social media. Green explicitly acknowledges that a blend of “Deena Katz’s great casting” with a laidback, uncoerced social strategy has served them well.

The showrunner explains that the social media savviness of professional dancers Rylee Arnold and Ezra Sosa was a turning point for the show that turned into a natural tactic for viewership. Instead of forcing the cast to post online, “a lot of our other dancers saw how much attention [Rylee and Ezra’s social media activity] was getting their couples, and decided to do more themselves.” 

But posting on social media isn’t a part of the DWTS contract — which is another reason why the team’s casual strategy has worked in favor of the show. 

“We don’t arm twist people into doing it. I never say to people, ‘It’s a part of the job that you have to do loads of social media posts.’ I think a lot of the couples see it in their benefit to be part of that conversation,” Green adds. “It’s partly a strategy, it’s partly self motivated by our dancers and our celebrities.” 

Katz, who “was the first person in America hired” to work on DWTS, is the mastermind behind the celebrity (and pro) cast. After 20 years on air, part of what’s proved successful of her creative process is being “open” to “a new kind of a celebrity.”

And the modern day celebrity in 2025 appears to be the influencer. Season 34 isn’t the first time Katz cast a social media star, though it’s proved to be one of the first years that digital figures were able to influence their fanbases to tune in.  

“We’ve forever tried to figure out for such a long time, as long as social media has been around, that how putting somebody [like an influencer] on a show wouldn’t bring their audience over. It was so frustrating: Why do they have this many followers, but it doesn’t turn into viewers on TV?” Katz explains. “What has happened is the TikTok world has opened something up that I’ve never seen before, where we are so involved in the TikTok story every single week that there’s a whole new audience that needed to start watching our show to keep up with what was going on in social media.” 

This season tapped Alix Earle, Whitney Leavitt and Jen Affleck, whose bread and butter is creating content. While other cast members aren’t necessarily labeled “influencers,” Dylan Efron, Robert Irwin, Jordan Chiles, Scott Hoying and Lauren Jauregui have massive online presences, as the show’s contagious virality has parlayed positively onto the social medias of stars like Andy Richter, Elaine Hendrix and Danielle Fishel. 

It’s clear that the “celebrity” of today — at least by DWTS’ metric — includes influencers. Instead of shying away from inviting the demographic onto the show, Katz has fully embraced them, which has delivered quite the prosperous results.

“If you want to grow as a show and audience, you have to be willing to open up to different ideas of what celebrity is. For some people, Alix Earle is the biggest star we’ve ever had on the show, because that is their world,” Katz notes. “You have to be able to open up and appreciate that it’s not the old sitcom star and athlete that’s a celebrity anymore. You need to embrace it and understand that they are really stars in their own right.” 

An additional viral component of season 34 was Tom Bergeron’s return to the ballroom. The former host’s guest judge appearance for the special 20th Birthday Party episode was quite a celebratory night, but that doesn’t mean the audience should expect a permanent homecoming in Bergeron’s future. 

“We’ve evolved,” Katz responds when asked if she sees Bergeron ever hosting DWTS again. “Tom is part of our family, obviously. … I don’t ever see [us] bringing him back in that role, because now that’s Alfonso’s role, and I don’t think Tom would do that either. Maybe there’s something, who knows what it is.”

One of the downsides of all the new eyes on the series is the negative online discourse. The celebrities, pro dancers and judges have been subject to virtual attacks each week, as some fans launched online hate campaigns against certain stars to ensure they’d be voted off, while others flooded their socials with hostile comments. 

“It’s awful,” Green says of the online negativity surrounding the series. “There’s this element of social media where some people feel they’re entitled to be as mean as you can possibly be just for the sake of sport. It’s certainly been hard for the cast this season, and some people get that much harder than others.”

Green is talking about The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Leavitt. The reality star was tormented during her run on the competitive ballroom series online for various unjust reasons, including admitting to past dance experience and revealing on season three of the Hulu show that she stayed on her cast for a shot at DWTS.

“I was astonished when I was reading some of the things that are written about Whitney, who’s the nicest person you could ever meet, super talented and loving being on the show,” Green recalls. “There’s no difference to me in her journey, frankly, than Alix Earle’s. And yet one of them seems to be getting tons of hate.”

The showrunner admits “it’s a bigger issue than this show,” adding that he encourages the cast to “switch off your phone [and] don’t read below the line” as to tune out the noise. 

Baldwin was similarly criticized for having a dance background, and even spoke out about the alleged virtual “campaigns” against certain cast members that prompted viewers to vote for everyone else except the celebrity they wanted to be eliminated. But DWTS has seen boy band/girl group members, Broadway alumni, a Dance Moms cast member and plenty of other stars whose jobs require dance training hit the ballroom floor — and the EPs assure there’s nothing wrong with having this experience. 

In fact, Green explains that it’s a part of the makeup of the show, though Katz assures she’d “never audition them on dancing” experience as a basis to be cast.

“When you look at this current cast, Elaine Hendrix was a professional dancer in her youth. Hilaria Baldwin has the most ballroom and latin background of anyone. Whitney competed at dance when she was younger in Utah. Alix Earle competed at dance when she was younger. On the other side, you’ve got Dylan and Robert, who have no real background, and Andy Richter, or Jordan has great athletic ability that is a sort of superpower,” he explains. “You can never level the playing field of an audience. And so in many ways, the public vote is there to level the playing field.” 

“It makes the show better when people can dance well. It’s engaging and it’s super entertaining,” Green adds. “We’re always trying to balance out those two things. And the journey of Andy Richter, Dylan and Robert, who’ve had no dance experience, indicates that these two things can live together in the same show and still feel great.” 

The elimination system poses another major question: Just how much weight do the judges scores and viewer votes hold? “It’s 50/50, effectively,” Green says, explaining that couples receive ranking points based on where they fall on both the judges leaderboard and in the public vote that are later combined to determine eliminations.

“When you see the judges’ leaderboards, say there’s five couples and you’re in first place on that leaderboard, you get five judges ranking points. If you’re in second place, you get four, if you’re in third place, you get three, [fourth place,] two, [and fifth place,] one,” he divulges. “We do the same with the amount of public votes. You add those two [separate] ranking points together, and the couple with the lowest combined total of those ranking points goes home. And if there’s a tie on those ranking points, the couple with the fewest public votes goes home.” 

Would DWTS ever consider releasing the exact number of viewers’ votes to offer more clarity for eliminations? “I’d prefer not to,” Green says, arguing that releasing the audience stats “has a very strong chance of disincentivizing people taking part or might affect the votes going forward, because people understand who to vote for. In all kinds of ways, like any election or vote, you don’t want to be prejudicing the election or vote.”

Amid all the online chatter, DWTS is undeniably more popular than ever. It will be hard for season 35 to live up to season 34, and while next season isn’t something on Green’s mind (“I haven’t even thought about it yet,” he says with a laugh), Katz is wasting no time contemplating who will join the 2026 DWTS class.

“I am so scared for next year and so motivated. I will literally start working on next year as soon as this season is over — I already have things in my head,” the casting connoisseur teases. “We’re gonna do the finale, we will go away for Thanksgiving, and that Monday, we’ll start working on next season. It’s invigorating, it’s exciting. … I have so much pressure on myself, but I literally can’t wait to see what happens in season 35.” 

Looking forward, the reach of the 34th installment could entice more high-profile stars to take their turn in the ballroom. But both Green and Katz assure that’s not necessarily something the show needs to succeed.

“I certainly am not foolish to think that I now have a little more caché than maybe we had a few years ago,” Katz admits of who she could cast, while Green adds, “Big A-list names aren’t necessarily what would work on the show. What works best is people who are passionate about doing it.”

“The number of followers [a cast member has] doesn’t hurt. But sometimes it’s not so much the amount, it’s the engagement of those followers and [casting] people [who] really can grow and have a personal journey,” Katz says. “Because it’s great to have people who have really big followers, but if there’s no growth on the show, if there’s not something [where] they have a life-changing moment that the audience is sucked into, they’re not going to be a good cast member.” 

But first, the DWTS judges and audience must crown their next winner. Though it appears the real mirrorball-worthy moment of season 34 has already panned out.

“It warms my heart that people love this show so much, that they’re coming back in numbers that I’m not sure we’ve ever seen in this way,” Katz professes. “I am so proud of what we’ve done. I love this show so much — and that America still loves the show.”

“To see the show in this health in its 20th year and how much pleasure and joy it’s bringing to people and to see new people engaging with it has been a great pleasure. I’m very proud of the show and everyone who works on it for pulling that off,” Green affirms.

The finale of season 34 of Dancing With the Stars airs and streams simultaneously on ABC and Disney+ on Tuesday from 8-11 p.m. All episodes are available to stream on Wednesday on Hulu.