Over the last decade, Ryan O’Dowd has written some of the biggest live moments on television — including those from the past seven years of “Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve With Ryan Seacrest” and awards shows like the CMAs, the Billboard Music Awards and the Emmys. And he’s always loved the rush of live TV.
“I love the immediacy of it,” O’Dowd, president of unscripted at BBC Studios, says. “I loved, as a writer, the ability to have something happen, to react to it, to think of what we could do that would entertain and engage literally within three minutes coming out of a commercial break. We’d come up with the idea to pitch it to the host, have them be behind it, get it into the teleprompter, and have 40,000 people in an arena see it three minutes later.”
This year, the idea that “live TV is back” is bigger than ever, and he sees that every single week. Serving as an executive producer on “Dancing With the Stars,” the largest live entertainment television show of the year, O’Dowd has a front seat to the massive ratings, the millions of votes coming in between 8 and 10 p.m. Eastern every Tuesday night and, more than ever, the engagement on social media.
“Within the last few years in particular, with TikTok, that has become an engagement unlike anything I had ever seen,” says O’Dowd, who is keeping an eye on that engagement during every live show from inside the studio, and watches people join the official “Dancing” account’s TikTok Lives during commercial breaks.
“It’s just an amazing continuation. It’s a whole separate vehicle that, luckily, our pro dancers and the celebrities on the show have embraced, and they’ve seen the power of being able to tell their story and connect comedically with their audience,” he says. “Going into this season, Andy Richter didn’t have much of a social media presence, to be honest, or he wasn’t very active on social media. And then within a few weeks, he saw the power of being able to engage and leverage a devout following. The more he put out, the more he got back in terms of fandom. Next thing you know, you have a fan base with a name ‘The Fandies,’ and Johnny Knoxville was coming to support him in a bedazzled ‘Vote for Andy’ shirt that he bedazzled.”
Ryan O’Dowd, BBC Studios; Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli
At the time of publishing, Richter has more than 122K followers and 968K likes on TikTok, and he’s on the lower end of the spectrum: His partner, Emma Slater, hit 1 million Instagram followers ahead of the finale. The most popular cast member on social media is Robert Irwin, with 9.7 million TikTok followers and nearly 9 million on Instagram.
One Instagram account, Pop Culture Data, is followed by multiple execs who work on the show and tracks the contestant and pro follower counts by week, with Irwin at the top each time. (After week one, his combined Instagram and TikTok growth was +343,220. Danielle Fishel, Whitney Leavitt, Alix Earle and pro Daniella Karagach gained spots in the top five in the weeks that followed.)
“TikTok has been a great vehicle for the show, and it serves the show, and the show serves TikTok. It’s become a symbiotic relationship, that everybody wins,” O’Dowd says. Luckily, there’s an excellent social media team in place — even though the pros and celebrities seemingly need much help in that arena. “Their talents go beyond what they’re seeing on the dance floor. They come in every week, embracing it, asking, ‘What are the videos and the content that we can put out that will tease what we’re doing this week, that will engage an audience?’ The best example is what Daniella and Dylan did with the air walk. They’re very smart, and it’s going to start a conversation. It’s a viral moment that people are gonna be talking about. I have seen 100 different videos of couples this past week recreating that. It’s just the gift that keeps on giving, where they’re able to choreograph something that gets people talking and then doing user-generated content that then keeps us in the zeitgeist 24/7.”
It helps, O’Dowd notes, that there’s a “healthy competition” among the entire cast. “When you get those viral moments, all of them go back to the drawing board, wanting to choreograph and create their own viral moment.”
As always, with more viewers — Prince week became the most-watched semifinals in seven years — comes more opinions. This season, Carrie Ann Inaba has been getting the brunt of the negative feedback for her judging. Elsewhere, contestants and pros alike have spoken up about online bullying that comes along with being on a competition show.
“To Carrie Ann’s credit, there are times that she’s the last to speak. She has plenty of positive things to say, but she’s looking at the totality of X number of seconds allotted to the judges, and if Bruno Tonioli and Derek Hough have already touched on the positive attributes of the dance they just saw, and she knows that there is one slight misstep, she’s going to — for the good of the show — talk about that,” says O’Dowd. “Everything can’t always be positive across the board. Part of what viewers, I think, want is the ability to understand what each of these dancers needs to do to get better.”
Plus the pros, celebrities and audiences appreciate real feedback, he says — and don’t want to hear only praise week after week. “It diminishes the moments when someone is truly deserving of emphatic praise across the board. So you need a diversity of opinion. You need to point out when something is great and conversely, when something could be better.”
Alfonso Ribeiro, Julianne Hough, Whitney Leavitt and Mark Ballas
Disney
Semifinals saw the most shocking elimination of the season, with Whitney Leavitt being eliminated despite being one of the best celebrity dancers in the group. But, people aren’t just voting on the merits of the dancing, O’Dowd says as a reminder. On Season 3 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” which premiered on Nov. 13, Leavitt admitted she only came back to the Hulu show for a shot at “Dancing With the Stars” — and some viewers didn’t like that type of honesty.
“Obviously, she has ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives‘ that just came out that previous week on Hulu. And I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t think that played a role,” he says. “Our job is to really just give her a platform and an opportunity to display her dance to the best of her abilities, and to allow her to reach an audience that can vote based on what they’ve seen that night.
“She was clear with her intention,” O’Dowd continues. “We should be celebrating someone who’s been very clear with what their intentions and motivations are, and who has, in some ways, realized the dream that she had and the goal that she had. So why see it for anything other than her just chasing her dream — which is something we all should aspire to?”
After such a successful season, the pressure is on for Season 35 next fall, and the conversations around casting have already begun with Deena Katz, who’s been part of the show since day one.
“She is always two steps ahead in terms of people who we not even know today. She has a finger on the pulse, knowing that, come September of next year, these people are going to be big, which is exactly what you did with Robert Irwin,” says O’Dowd. “There’s an admitted pressure to match, if not exceed, the type of cast that we’ve delivered this season. We all have already begun speaking about who those names are and what we can do. We’ve also, very deliberately, held a couple spots until the last few weeks, to be able to book somebody that nobody really knew prior to that exact moment, and to be able to be nimble and act immediately.”
The casting process will likely be a bit different next year, since Season 34 has become such a juggernaut, and has changed the perception of the show.
“Many years ago, when we were in a bit of a lull, it wasn’t as sexy of a proposition to come on ‘Dancing.’ There was this notion that it’s kind of the last chapter of your career. What I’m personally very proud of is that now we’ve built the brand to be a place where this can be a launching pad for so many new opportunities post-‘Dancing,’” says O’Dowd. “I can’t tell you how many talent on the show this season whose reps have said to ABC they are blown away by the amount of opportunities that have presented themselves.”
So, what will change going forward? When Tom Bergeron came back into the ballroom, he mentioned that he’d like to see the return of the results show; “Dancing With the Stars” previously aired two nights a week, one night for dances, the second for the elimination.
“My personal opinion is, while there is one school of thought that when you’re at the height of the brand, you should chase more hours, that actually, you’d be sacrificing the longevity of the series, and you would be diminishing the value of the main show,” O’Dowd says. “I think why we’re getting the viewership and the engagement that we’re getting right now is that on every Tuesday night, from 8-10, you’re going to see multiple performances, you’re able to engage live on social media, and at the conclusion of that two hours, you’re gonna get to see someone, based on the performances you just witnessed, go home. There’s a resolution to everything that just happened in that given episode.”
But there’s still an opportunity for more. “I think what we would prefer to do is to find ‘Dancing With the Stars’-adjacent vehicles to harness the leverage, the interest in the brand, but not diminish the main show. I really believe that the main show being a two-hour show — we get a beginning, middle and end and a resolution — is why we have the engagement that we do.”
From 2006 to 2018, “Dancing” aired two seasons a year — one in the fall, one in the spring. But O’Dowd feels similarly skeptical about the possibility of bringing back a second cycle. “I think the build-up and the intrigue of who we’re gonna cast on the show leading into the fall is so much more heightened when you’ve had a bit of a breathing room,” he says. “I think a second cycle, which we’ve done before, you’re chasing a short-term gain at the expense of the longevity of the series.”
Plus, the “DWTS: Live” tour runs from January to May, giving fans a way to stay in the “Dancing With the Stars” bubble. Not only are fans around the country able to have meet-and-greets with the professional dancers and celebrities, but the word continues to spread on social media from the tour.
“We joke about how 10 years ago, we had to make sure the tour was safe for walkers. Now, we have college students lining up — thousands of them buying merch,” he says. “We have the tour buses come out, and hundreds of people are lining up outside the barricades of people wanting to get a photo with our pros before the tour bus takes off for the next city.”
Previous champions Rumer Willis and Kaitlyn Bristowe returned for the 20th anniversary show.
Disney
Of course, another way to expand the popularity of “DWTS” would be to do an all-stars season, especially because many viewers feel that some runner-ups and third-place celebs should have won the mirrorball.
“We’ve talked about it; we’ll continue to talk about it. We’re not closing the door on it,” he says. “The allure of the show is, who are the people we’re going to cast that you’ve never seen before? We had an element of it in the 20th birthday episode, of course, where we brought back previous winners, and that was great. But I think the beauty of the show is getting to see new people each and every cycle, some of whom you may never have even heard of prior.”
O’Dowd and BBC Studios Los Angeles produce a great deal of television, working with top talent — from Joel McHale on “1% Club” and Jane Lynch on “Celebrity Weakest Lunch.” They’ve created “Life Before Zero” for Nat Geo and “Outlast” for Netflix,” and are bringing back “Ladies of London” to Bravo.
“I’m proud of what we’ve been able to do to grow the business to a place where we’re having a show in pretty much every genre within unscripted, and that breadth allows us to do much more,” O’Dowd says.
And the success of “Dancing With the Stars” has only taught him how to succeed further in every genre.
“Creating shows that bring people together has never been more important. What we’ve always strived to do, but are making even more conservative efforts to do as a result of this season of ‘Dancing,’ is to create shows that are part of the conversation, that engage an audience on social media and get people talking — that allows for a younger audience without alienating a core older audience, if it’s pre-existing format,” O’Dowd says. “But I think the biggest thing is that live TV community has never been stronger and it’s about doing things that bring people together.”
The finale of “Dancing With the Stars” airs Tuesday, Nov. 25 at 8 p.m. ET. on ABC and Disney+. It will stream the next day on Hulu.
