How "Dancing With The Stars" Brought Back Shared Pop Culture

Back when everyone smelled like a Hollister fitting room, wore low-rise jeans, and rushed home to watch American Idol or sneak Gossip Girl on weeknights, you didn’t have to ask what people were watching. I remember sitting with my family as a young girl, voting on a phone, then arguing at school the next day about whether the right person had gone home. For the most part, we all watched (or at least knew of) the shows and moments that felt unavoidable. The odds were high that your friends had seen the same viral video on YouTube, caught the same movie in theaters, or sang the same radio hits on the drive to cheer practice.

Unfortunately, that world feels far away now.

Today, your algorithm builds a little universe just for you. It’s great, but also a little concerning. We’re trapped in an online reality tunnel that affirms our biases while steering us toward niche creators and micro-fandoms, away from the broader cultural moments that once tied us together. Someone else’s feed might be full of monster smut recommendations or dancing Mormon moms, while yours is a mix of beauty hacks or red carpet breakdowns. 

On the political side of the media landscape, conservatives and progressives seem to disagree on everything, each scrolling through feeds that insist the world is either collapsing or moments away from becoming The Handmaid’s Tale. The mid-2010s hardened that divide. Social media got better at holding us in self-contained corridors; shared pop culture receded into nostalgia. It’s no surprise Gen Z and Gen Alpha have gravitated toward a bygone era when the culture moved as one, especially after years of being split into algorithmic micro-worlds. And it feels almost ridiculous that one of the clearest counterexamples to this fragmentation is Dancing With the Stars.

After nearly two decades on air, DWTS had every right to settle into comfortable irrelevance. The format is practically ancient by TV standards, whereby a celebrity, a professional dancer, a choreographed routine, a panel of judges, and a live vote defined the show. For a while, the audience reflected that stability. As The New York Times noted, the median viewer age in 2022 hovered in the mid-60s, which made sense for a show born in 2005 and rooted in a ballroom tradition that predates TikTok by a century.

Yet over the last few seasons, something changed, and the show managed to attract new viewers without losing its identity. In fact, DWTS kept the sequins, the judges, and sentimental packages. What did change, however, was the way it slipped back into pop culture.  

How Dancing With the Stars Accidentally Reset the Culture

Season 34’s cast, for example, looks chaotic on paper, but it makes perfect sense for the internet era. There is Elaine Hendrix, forever immortalized as the villainous fiancée in The Parent Trap, now recast in the public imagination as a kind of nostalgia avatar. There is Andy Richter, Conan O’Brien’s late-night sidekick turned underdog. They gave us “it girl” Alix Earle, a 7-million-follower content creator known for her messy life updates and get-ready-with-me videos. Then, there are “nepo” darlings like Robert Irwin and Dylan Efron, whose last names trigger their own layer of recognition. Needless to say, the casting is brilliant: reality-TV obsessives, nostalgia-driven movie lovers, TikTok lovers, and anyone who grew up watching Steve Irwin have all been pulled into the same room again. Like a wizard, Deena Katz — the show’s longtime casting director and co-executive producer — has managed to lock everyone’s attention onto the ballroom once again. 

The New Definition of “Celebrity”

Katz has been quietly tuning the mix for the past twenty seasons. “You look back at season 1 and we had an athlete, a boy-bander, an actor, a soap opera star,” she told Marie Claire. There were fewer categories back then. Television stars, recording artists, a stray athlete or two. The idea of “celebrity” was narrow enough that a handful of types could stand in for the whole ecosystem. Today, Katz’s current casts look more like the internet itself: a mix bag of Influencers, Olympians, nostalgia picks, and reality villains. “Celebrity itself has evolved over the years and it makes it more fun,” she said in the same interview, noting that the range of categories lets the show “tap into more audiences” at once. The point is not that everyone knows everyone. The point is that everyone knows someone.

Her own family proves the concept. Katz told Marie Claire that her 25-year-old daughter initially tuned in for Alix Earle. Now she and her friends are invested in Andy Richter and Elaine Hendrix, the exact sort of contestants a younger viewer might have shrugged at ten years ago. “To me, success is that my daughter is crying every week, hoping that Andy lasts,” Katz said. You can still root for Alix; the magic is that you end up caring about someone who never appeared in your feed before.

The numbers have surged thanks to the casting. Viewership grew week after week, busting a ratings record the network had been sitting on since 1991. Live episodes have pulled in nearly six million same-day viewers on ABC alone, edging out reality stalwarts like The Voice and Survivor. DWTS, as reported by The Ankler, saw its Disney-themed night celebrating Disneyland’s 70th anniversary pull in more than 45 million votes. 

The network has been experimenting, too. When DWTS briefly moved to Disney+ in 2022, the idea was to drag older viewers into the streaming ecosystem, yet the experiment turned out to be more useful as a stress test. Conrad Green returned as showrunner. Charli D’Amelio, then eighteen, joined as a contestant, bringing a TikTok following in the hundreds of millions. Her routines with Mark Ballas were tuned both to ballroom requirements and to dance trends that already lived on the platform. As Green later explained, casting her “brought a lot of younger audience to watch the show on Disney+,” who then carried that attention back to ABC when the show returned to broadcast.

TikTok has been a huge marketing tool for the show as well. Clips of dance routines took over the platform. Contestants and pros flood feeds with rehearsal footage, bloopers, and soft-launch chemistry, then watch that content boomerang back as engagement and votes. Green told The New York Times, “We’ve kind of hit this tipping point where now we feed TikTok, TikTok feeds back to us.” He sees it as a loop: the show produces short, intense bursts of performance that fit perfectly within a one-minute video, and those videos then pull people back into the two-hour broadcast. 

Professional dancers like Rylee Arnold sit right at the center of this shift. Arnold, who previously appeared on the franchise’s Juniors spin-off, approaches the show the same way any nineteen-year-old creator approaches their life: everything becomes content. She told The New York Times that in the beginning, people on set would see her filming TikToks and wonder what she was doing. Then production noticed that she and her partners kept being saved by voters, despite lukewarm scores from judges. “It wasn’t our dancing that took us far,” Arnold admitted. She believed that people were voting because she was documenting the entire experience online: the rehearsals, the post-practice food runs, the goofy moments in between. Several of her clips now sit comfortably above six million views.

Green now treats that instinct as an asset. He described Arnold as a sort of informal consultant to other contestants, someone who understands how to reach fans where they already are. In earlier years, a celebrity might have relied on morning show interviews and radio spots to stay in the conversation between episodes. Now the show’s own social team films behind-the-scenes reels, and pro dancers go live on the official account during the 500th episode.

DWTS has now relied on social media and has reshaped its casting around the internet’s ecosystem, bringing in viral faces like the Olympians from Paris, and even figures like Anna Sorokin — better known as Anna Delvey — who reportedly performed while wearing an ankle monitor. Still, there are limits. Katz has made it clear she’s “trying to stay away from political [people] right now.” The show has welcomed controversial names in the past, but the current strategy steers away from outrage bait and toward contestants who spark conversation without turning the ballroom into another culture-war battlefield.

The Return of the Weekly Ritual

The show hasn’t abandoned its original spine to get to where it is now. As one Cornell Daily Sun critic noted, DWTS has to walk a line between contemporary energy and the “artistry, elegance and discipline of traditional ballroom dance.” That tension is visible every week. A TikTok Night might feature routines set to viral songs like “Pop Muzik” or “Million Dollar Baby,” choreographed with an eye toward entertaining the audience as much as satisfying ballroom purists. Yet the waltz, foxtrot, and tango still exist as standards. They give the judges something concrete to examine, something grounded beyond whatever happens to be trending.

And because DWTS never abandoned its weekly format, it’s suddenly tapping into a feeling viewers forgot they missed. After a decade of binge culture, people seem restless with the speed of streaming. A weekly episode builds anticipation and gives viewers a reason to return, and a window of time where everyone’s actually watching together. Above all, DWTS has taught everyone that those niches can overlap and we can all gather around something together, the way we used to.

So as corny as this sounds, DWTS feels oddly hopeful in a climate that often feels like a never-ending referendum on who is right about everything. All I have to do is turn on the TV and watch a season where a TikTok star, a wildlife personality, a Mormon influencer, and a sitcom icon share a stage, pulling people away from the idea that their own feed is the whole universe. I'm not saying a sparkly foxtrot will heal the fractures in the culture. We've got a long way to go. But the fact that an old ballroom show can still get millions of people to care about the same minute-long performance in 2025 shows that the instinct for a shared cultural moment hasn’t disappeared, even under all our personalized feeds.