Did TikTok Save Dancing with the Stars?

Tomorrow marks the return of one of my favorite reality competition shows, Dancing with the Stars (DWTS). Its 34th season will be premiering September 16th, and I cannot wait. Dancing with the Stars is a dance competition show that has been airing on ABC for the past 20 years. The premise involves pairing celebrities with professional dancers. And over the last 20 years, the show has had its ups and downs. And until recently, it had been in one of those “downs”. 

In 2022, it was announced that season 31 of the show would be moving to exclusively stream on Disney+, the streaming platform’s first step into live television, but marking the end of DWTS’s home on ABC. This causes a blow to viewership, as not all die-hard fans have Disney+. However, by 2023, the show had been brought back to ABC for Season 32. There was never a real formal explanation for the return to ABC, but fans were delighted. And things only began to go up from there.

Season 33, which aired in the fall of 2024, saw incredible growth in viewership and audience participation. DWTS relies on live audience votes to determine who will continue in the competition. Episode 2 of Season 33 garnered more than 14 million fan votes, setting a new record for a single episode in the show’s 20-year history. This means more votes were being sent in than the show’s most watched season in 2011! (2011’s season 12 drew in more than 22 million viewers). By the finale, there were 7.95 million viewers and 35 million votes tallied. 

I believe the recent success of DWTS can be attributed to TikTok. Over the course of this article, I want to take a deep dive into TikTok’s evolving influence on the show. 

Season 31: Charli D’Amelio

Charli D’Amelio is one of the most famous TikTok influencers. As of Sep 2025, she has ​​156.4 million followers and 11.9 billion likes. In 2022, Charli was paired with professional dancer Mark Ballas, and they waltzed in to take that year’s championship. I’m considering this the first introduction of an informal TikTok and DWTS partnership. Throughout the season, Charli would be producing content about rehearsals and posting her own dances on her personal TikTok page. Charli and Mark reunited to dance at the season 32 finale. The TikTok video of their performance is one of the official Dancing with the Stars page’s most viewed videos. It has over 15.4 million views and 1 million likes.

Season 32: Rising Stars

In 2023, Season 32 was announced. As stated above, the show would be returning to airing live on ABC (and also live on Disney+). This wasn’t the only news; a new professional dancer was being added to the pros list– Rylee Arnold. Sister to longtime pro and DWTS champion, Lindsay Arnold, Rylee already had a built-in TikTok following. She was instantly beloved by the DWTS community, not only for bringing a new Gen Z perspective to dance, but also for her ties to the show. That season, she was paired with Harry Jowsey from Too Hot to Handle. Their first dance together created a TikTok dance trend. The original TikTok audio has over 41.5K posts under it. 

Rylee has the most TikTok followers of all the pros as of September 2025, with 1.5 million followers and 136.7 million likes. This season also featured a Gen Z mirrorball champion, Xochitl Gomez. Xochitl was also very active on TikTok during this season. Her DWTS TikTok folder features her videos posted during her time on the show, each with at least a million views

Season 33: Growing a TikTok Presence

After the success of season 32, and many moments from the show having their fair share of time on the app, it seemed the show’s marketing department took full advantage of this new tool. It seems that during this season, they must have told the pros to be more active on the show. Both pros and stars were posting rehearsal and other DWTS content on their own personal accounts. 

This season also had its fair share of people who were famous and relevant on social media (especially on TikTok):

Joey Graziadei– The Bachelor (season 28) had gotten lots of TikTok attention over the course of his involvement with the Bachelor Nation franchises. He went on to be the Mirrorball Champion of this season.

Ilona Maher– US Olympic Rugby player who got millions of views for making content from the Olympic Village. 

Stephen Nedoroscik– aka“the pommel horse guy.” A US Olympic Gymnast who went viral for his pommel horse routine.

The combination of having built-in TikTok-famous contestants as well as an increasing TikTok presence from the cast continued to get people talking about the show!

Season 33 didn’t only get recognition for its cast, but also for a series of viral moments:

Pro Ezra Sosa created his own viral TikTok audio. When his partner, Anna Delvey, and he were eliminated, Anna famously said she would take “nothing” from the experience. Ezra created an audio pairing her voiceover with “I Have Nothing” by Whitney Houston. Ezra is another newer Gen Z pro who is very active on TikTok.

There were also TikTok dance trends that came out of this season. The most popular was Witney Carson and Danny Amendola’s viral lift.

Joey Graziadei and Jenna Johnson’s Tarzan-themed dance from Disney Night also sparked a new dance trend.

This viral video from a portion of Joey and Jenna’s samba got 2 million views and 187.3 K likes– thus starting a new DWTS-inspired trend.

With the upcoming season, we are bound to see more trends coming from DWTS and loads of videos being put out by these new pairings. Season 34 has also brought in Alix Earle, another huge TikTok influencer, as one of its stars. TikTok has become a way for people to reach “celebrity” status, but most of all, it’s a promotional tool that DWTS has been using successfully! 

Deena Katz, an executive producer for DWTS, has spoken openly about trying to get younger generations through social media into DWTS. 

“There’s a very fine line of reaching out so that Gen Z watches it, that we’re in their zeitgeist, but also making sure that we’re still giving what our core audience wants. A lot of shows go one way or another. You want the core audience who has been there forever is still getting exactly what they want, and yet, modernizing it for everyone else to watch as well“

Deena Katz to Variety

TikTok has an intentional (and unintentional) influence on Dancing with the Stars, and it’s not going away anytime soon, as the program seems to have accepted it with open arms. 

I have been watching this show for as long as I can remember, so I’m thrilled more people are finding it. While there is a lot of nostalgia baked into my love for Dancing with the Stars, I’m glad to see it’s getting a rebirth and modernizing in a sense! Tune in Tuesday nights starting September 16th to catch Dancing with the Stars! 

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