TV Ratings: ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Finale Scores Nine-Year High

The biggest Dancing With the Stars season in years ended, fittingly, with the show’s most watched finale in nearly a decade.

Tuesday’s final episode of season 34 delivered 9.24 million viewers, based on preliminary Nielsen ratings (which don’t include the company’s big data component). That’s a season high — easily topping the 7.22 million viewers for the previous week — and the largest same-day audience for a DWTS finale since November 2016, when 10.97 million people watched the final episode.

In the key ad demographic of adults 18-49, Tuesday’s finale scored a 2.15 rating, almost doubling the 1.14 for last season’s finale. It’s the best showing in the demo for a DWTS finale since 2015.

Final same-day raitngs, which will likely include some adjustments with the addition of Nielsen’s big data element, will be released in a few days.

Season 34 as a whole averaged a little under 6.5 million same-day viewers, the highest total since season 28 in 2019. Among adults 18-49, this season’s 1.34 rating is the best since a 1.37 for the fall 2017 edition of DWTS. Including a week of streaming and other delayed viewing, Dancing With the Stars is averaging about 8.6 million viewers (through Nov. 9, before the season’s two biggest episodes aired).

Dancing With the Stars is also the first network entertainment series — i.e., not sports or news — since the 2020-21 season to score a 1.0 rating (equivalent to about 1.36 million people ages 18-49) or better without the aid of delayed viewing or streaming.

The show’s resurgence this season wasn’t just reflected in TV ratings, which grew by about 33 percent among all viewers and by a huge 82 percent in adults 18-49. Audience voting also hit all-time highs, with 72 million cast during the finale and almost 500 million over the course of the season. Social media interaction related to the series has spiked as well. Showrunner Conrad Green cited the latter as a major factor fueling this season’s growth, and casting director Deena Katz has leaned into having influencers and other social media celebrities on the show.

“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 told The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”