Dancing with the Stars returns tonight, and last season's winning pro is dancing 5 months pregnant
Sixteen couples, two premiere nights, and one thing this ballroom has not had before: the pro who won the last mirrorball is dancing five months pregnant — and she said so before the season started, not halfway through it.
Season 35 of Dancing with the Stars opens tonight at 8 ET on ABC, live on Disney+ at the same time, with a second night on Wednesday and Hulu catching up the morning after. Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough host; Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli judge, and two of them have sat on that panel since 2005.
Sixteen couples is a lot of ballroom for one show, which is why the premiere is split across two nights. But the line that matters is on the pro side, not the celebrity side: Witney Carson, who lifted the Mirrorball with Robert Irwin last November, is back on the floor five months pregnant.
She is partnered with Guillermo Rodriguez, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! parking-lot security guard turned sidekick, which makes this the rare pairing where the pro is carrying more than the choreography. She announced the pregnancy in August, at four months, and did it on purpose:
"I don't want to hide it. I am so proud to be a woman, to be creating life and growing this human."
The record she is setting has an asterisk, and it is the interesting part
Headlines have been calling her the first pregnant pro in the show's history. That is not quite right, and the correction is better than the claim. Peta Murgatroyd danced season 22 with Nyle DiMarco while expecting, and planned to keep it quiet until the second trimester. Allison Holker announced her own pregnancy live on air during season 21 and later stepped back.
So the first is narrower and stranger: Carson is the first to walk into a season with it already announced, on the record, before a single dance. Everyone before her was pregnant on the show. She is the first to be pregnant on the show on her own terms.
The record is not that a pro danced pregnant. It is that one finally did it without waiting to be found out.
Who else is in the ballroom
The celebrity list leans harder on scripted television than the last few seasons, and the pro roster has changed shape too. Adele Zaikman joins as a new professional after winning Dancing with the Stars: The Next Pro, and Sharna Burgess is competing for the first time since 2021. Among the pairings:
- Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy — a Step Up alum finally doing it in front of judges.
- Julia Stiles and Ezra Sosa — twenty-five years after Save the Last Dance.
- Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson — the Glee dancer with the unfair advantage.
- Giada De Laurentiis and Alan Bersten — the Food Network's entry.
- Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess — the returning pro's first partner in five years.
Carson's own history with this show runs to eleven years and one trophy, and she has said she intends to dance as long as her doctor lets her. The baby is her third with husband Carson McAllister. The mirrorball she is defending was won ten months ago, and the thing most likely to take it off her this season is a calendar.
Previously we wrote: Romantics Anonymous star Yuri Nakamura has died at 44, and the news was held for two weeks
