Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough return as hosts for Season 35. Photo: Disney/Matt Sayles.
Standing Tracker
DMM Watching
The four questions DMM is following all season. These update when the evidence changes — not when the headlines do.
The Next Pro Pipeline — Open
Does the competition create careers beyond one winning contract? Tracking troupe work, tours, choreography credits, teaching and recurring broadcast appearances over twelve months.
Experienced Dancers — Test Begins Sept 15
Harry Shum Jr., Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles. Which transferable skills actually help, and where does ballroom and Latin technique expose the limits of prior training?
Premiere Elimination Format — Active
Does sending a couple home after one routine reward immediate readiness at the expense of growth potential? Tracking scores, technical comments and the effect of split fields.
Professional Dancer Development — Active
Adele Zaikman’s transition to working pro, Hailey Bills’ promotion, Mark Ballas’ return, teaching and choreography decisions, substitutions and standout work.
The Feed
Season 35 · Week 1
Newest first. Older entries stay exactly as filed — this page is the season’s record, not a rolling rewrite.
September 15, 2026Breaking · Premiere
Season 35 Opens With Immediate Eliminations — Every First Dance Has Consequences
A two-night premiere splits the cast into separate men’s and women’s fields, and both nights end with someone going home.
Season 35 opens September 15 and 16, 2026, with the cast divided by night: male celebrities dance first, female celebrities follow on night two. One male and one female celebrity are eliminated during premiere week — the first premiere-week elimination format of this kind since 2018. Sixteen celebrity and professional partnerships are competing.
Mark Ballas publicly noted the unusual competitive dynamic created by splitting the cast into two separate fields. It is a real structural change: couples are no longer judged against the full season lineup on opening night, but against half of it.
Dancing with the Stars has always sold growth: the untrained celebrity who cannot find their frame in week one and is dancing a competent rumba by week six. Immediate elimination sits in tension with that premise. A partnership can end after a single judged routine, before the teaching relationship has had time to produce anything.
The question DMM is asking: how much can one routine actually tell us about a brand-new dance partnership? There is also a scheduling wrinkle worth noting — Harry Shum Jr. performs on the men’s night while Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles perform on the women’s night, so the three subjects of DMM’s prior-dance-experience analysis are never evaluated in the same opening field.
Breakout Watch — High
If the first result is surprising, technically significant or controversial, this becomes a standalone DMM story: DWTS Season 35 Eliminates Its First Couple — Did the Premiere Format Matter?
The Next Pro Returns to the Ballroom — But Only Adele Zaikman Has the Job
A reunion performance is exposure. A professional contract is employment. Season 35 is where that difference gets tested.
Adele Zaikman won the first season of Dancing with the Stars: The Next Pro, and her prize was a professional position on Season 35. ABC’s Season 35 cast materials list her as Conner Leavitt’s professional partner — the contract is real and it is documented.
Premiere reporting also indicates that Zaikman, Allen Genkin, Selena Hamilton and Erik Linder prepared a reunion performance. DMM is not describing Genkin, Hamilton or Linder as newly hired Season 35 professionals. Appearing in a reunion number is not the same as being employed by the show, and unless ABC separately announces employment, this page will not blur the two.
DMM Analysis
The open question is whether The Next Pro becomes a genuine career pipeline or functions mainly as a casting mechanism for a single vacancy. Over the next twelve months DMM is tracking the things that actually constitute a dance career: troupe employment, tour work, choreography credits, teaching, recurring DWTS appearances and outside professional opportunities.
Twelve dancers. One contract. One season to find out which it was. The premiere reunion does not settle that question — it postpones it.
Breakout Watch — Covered
DMM already has a dedicated Next Pro feature. Send readers there rather than opening a second URL, unless a major new career development earns its own story.
Alfonso Ribeiro Sees Harry Shum Jr., Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles as Early Season 35 Contenders
The host is naming names before a single score is read — and he has stood where these celebrities are standing.
Speaking around the 2026 Emmy period, Alfonso Ribeiro discussed Season 35 and singled out experienced performers he expects to be strong, naming Harry Shum Jr., Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles, while also noting that other cast members have impressed him.
Treat this as preseason expectation, not evidence. Hosts see rehearsal footage and rehearsal footage flatters everyone. What it does establish is where the conversation starts: three contestants arrive already carrying a dance reputation.
DMM Analysis
Ribeiro is his own counterexample and his own proof. Celebrity contestant, Season 19 champion, now host — an arc that says prior performance training can matter enormously, and also that the ballroom rewrites what a performer thinks they already know. DMM has published a dedicated analysis of whether previous dance experience creates a real advantage. His comments are a useful preseason marker to test it against, not a verdict.
Harry Shum Jr. Is the First Test of Season 35’s Dance-Experience Debate
Training gives a dancer a floor. The ballroom decides what it does not give him automatically.
Harry Shum Jr. is partnered with professional dancer Jenna Johnson for Season 35. Photo: Disney/Andrew Eccles.
Harry Shum Jr. is partnered with Jenna Johnson and brings substantial dance and choreography experience into the competition. He performs during the men’s premiere night; Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles perform during the women’s night, which means the season’s most-discussed experience question opens on two separate evenings.
DMM has already laid out what previous training may give Harry. The premiere is where we start learning what it does not hand him — ballroom frame, partner connection under a judge’s eye, Latin hip action, and the specific discipline of dancing someone else’s choreography in a televised competition format.
Scores, dance style, song and the judges’ technical comments will be added to this entry after the performance airs.
DMM Analysis
Prior training tends to show up first as confidence and musicality, and it tends to fail first at frame and partnering. Those are the two places DMM will be watching. A trained body can also carry habits that read beautifully in commercial choreography and read as errors in ballroom — and premiere night, under an immediate elimination format, is an unforgiving place to discover the difference.
Head Bumps, Drops and a Bruised Toe: Season 35 Rehearsals Are Already Taking a Toll
Before the first score is read, the professionals are managing bodies that have never done this work before.
Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas bumped heads during rehearsal. Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess also knocked heads while working through a trick that involved a drop. Giada De Laurentiis sustained a bruised toe while preparing with Alan Bersten, and Ciara Miller has discussed significant soreness during training. Current reporting does not establish that any of these issues will prevent a couple from competing.
DMM Analysis
The easy version of this story is an injury roundup. The real story is the invisible labor of the professional dancer. Every one of these incidents happened inside a job most viewers never see: teaching an untrained adult body, choreographing to that body’s limits, partnering safely through lifts and drops, pacing a rehearsal week so the celebrity peaks on camera rather than on Thursday.
Risk management is part of the professional’s craft, not an interruption of it. When a pro pulls a trick back, redesigns a transition or slows a rehearsal, that judgment is the skill.
Breakout Watch — Low
Escalate to a standalone story only if an injury changes a routine, forces a withdrawal or substitution, or becomes a significant professional-dancer story.
DWTS Opens Season 35 With Five Emmy Nominations and Renewed Industry Momentum
Recognition is context for the new season, not the headline of it.
Dancing with the Stars received five 2026 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Reality Competition Program — its first nomination in that major category in a decade. Alfonso Ribeiro publicly celebrated the recognition and emphasized the volume of work behind a live production.
Accuracy Note
The Traitors won Outstanding Reality Competition Program at the 2026 Emmys. Dancing with the Stars was a nominee in that category, not the winner. Any DMM coverage of this milestone must say nominated, never won.
DMM Analysis
A decade-long absence from that category ending says something about where the franchise sits in the industry again. The question Season 35 has to answer is whether it can carry that momentum without sanding down the element that earned it — the visible development of a dancer over a season. Recognition rewards spectacle quickly. Teaching takes longer and shows up later.
