Sequins, Wardrobe Malfunctions, and a Dance-Off: The Oral History of Dancing With the Stars Season 1 trucc

"Most people did not expect this show to work," says executive producer Conrad Green.

It’s a 10! And it has been for 20 years now.

Two decades ago this week, Dancing With the Stars crowned their first champion, permanently enshrining the ABC celebrity dance competition in pop culture.

The first season, which premiered on June 1, 2005, was by no means a sure thing. It only featured six celebrity contestants — Trista Sutter, Evander Holyfield, Rachel Hunter, Joey McIntyre, John O’Hurley, and Kelly Monaco — and aired live during the summer, traditionally a dead zone for primetime network television. Reality TV was a new phenomenon at the time, and it trended more toward dating shows like The Bachelor or extreme competitions such as Survivor.

Inspired by Britain’s Strictly Come Dancing, already a juggernaut in the U.K., Dancing With the Stars was unlike anything that had ever been on TV before in America — a reality show with celebrities competing alongside professional ballroom dancers (not exactly America’s national pastime).

But the show, with its original trio of judges — Len Goodman, Bruno Tonioli, and Carrie Ann Inaba — and its hosts, Tom Bergeron and Lisa Canning, captured America’s attention — and we haven’t stopped dancing since. 20 years later, here’s how the ballroom was built and why the Mirrorball trophy continues to shine just for us.

In May 2004, the format made its debut in Britain with the series Strictly Come Dancing, pairing celebrity contestants with professional ballroom dancers in a week-to-week competition where judges’ scores and audience votes would determine who would move on to the next week. Andrea Wong, ABC’s executive vice president, alternative programming, specials and late night, was determined to bring the show stateside.

DEENA KATZ (Executive Producer): I was called on the ABC side and told that Andrea Wong was passionate about trying to bring Strictly to America. They sent me Strictly, because I was not aware of it, and it was like, “Oh my gosh, live ballroom dance with celebrities.”

CONRAD GREEN (Executive Producer): I’d worked with a lot of the people in the U.K. who made the show when I was back in Britain. I moved to the States in 2003 and before then I'd worked in this world. I’d just finished working on a show with ABC, and so, when they were looking for an American based exec, I was well placed to be able to understand both worlds and to have a view of how to make a show that worked in the U.K. work here.

KATZ: I wasn't even sure the thing would ever go. They didn't have these kinds of shows. It was so much Fear Factor and things that were mean spirited.

GREEN: Those early conversations were all about, “Will this show work here? How does it work here?” Most people did not expect this show to work because there wasn't really a mainstream history of ballroom dancing. The idea of celebrity ballroom dancing seemed so wacky and offbeat at the time. But talking to the people back in Britain and understanding what made it work there, there are core values of television and entertainment at the core of this show. Those are universal. So, I was quietly confident it would at least make a splash and could be fun. I didn't think for a second that 20 years on we would be having this conversation.

Once ABC decided to try to develop the show, Green and Katz were tasked with finding a host, as well as judges. But first, they had to do something about the title.

GREEN: It was called Strictly Come Dancing in the U.K. because one of the longest running TV shows was called Come Dancing, which was in the 1950s and literally just showed ballroom competitions. Then, the Baz Luhrmann film Strictly Ballroom came out just a few years before this. So, they called the show Strictly Come Dancing, which is an absolutely absurd title outside the U.K. So, very quickly we had to take a view of, “Well, what do we call this that makes any sense to people?” You want a show that tells you what's in the tin.

TOM BERGERON (Host, 2005-2019): My agent called me and said, “ABC wants you to do a summer show and you're going to do it.” I went, “Oh, really? Wow. What is it?”  She said, “It's live. You love live.” I said, “Yeah, what is it?” She said, “It's a big hit in England.” I said, “Okay, what is it?” She said, “Listen, you've got to promise me that you're going to look at a DVD of the British show before you give me an answer.” I went, “Well, that's fair, but now will you tell me what it is?”

GREEN: It's a live show, so I wanted someone who really understood live. There is a tendency sometimes to assume that anyone can host, but live shows are all about confidence. If you have a host who isn't very good at live, the whole show feels incompetent and you really only get one chance to make a first impression. 

BERGERON: My agent said, “It's a ballroom dance program.” I said, “Oh, for Christ's sake, are you kidding me?”

A key part of the British show was its judges, particularly the theatrical Bruno Tonioli, a longtime choreographer, and Len Goodman, a legend in the world of ballroom dance.

BRUNO TONIOLI (Judge, 2005-present): I thought it was a joke. My agent at the time used to be a bit of a prankster, and I had this call and he said, “Well, darling, Hollywood, yes?” I didn't believe it. I said, “What do you mean? Are you kidding me?” I was laughing because I thought it was a joke because it was my dream. It's like everyone's dream.

GREEN: Bruno brought so much of the comedy and energy.

CARRIE ANN INABA (Judge, 2005-present): I had been doing a lot of on-camera choreography in this world of reality television. My agents and I thought I was going to interview as a producer. I don’t know what happened, but they interviewed pretty much every choreographer in L.A. It was really fun. I got to sit with all of my peers on faux panels and we would watch videos from Strictly Come Dancing and judge them. 

GREEN: I’d worked with Carrie Ann recently before this and I thought she had tons of charisma and also loads of knowledge. When we were looking, we were basically looking at choreographers and people in the dance industry who had good reputations and someone who would cut a bit different against Len and Bruno. You don't want to get three Brits on a panel, otherwise you look like you're importing something completely different. 

TONIOLI: I actually did the pilot without Len and Carrie Ann. I was brought in, and they wanted somebody like Len, but I said, “You cannot have somebody like Len, because you need the real thing.” I had to spend a few days sitting with people to see if there was chemistry. But this is not learning a role. You have to be that character. You have to have that personality. You cannot create it. So, we did a pilot without Len, and then finally the penny dropped, and Len arrived literally two days before the premiere.

GREEN: Len, that character of a stern Englishman with a twinkle in his eye, felt like the core of what the show was. It also badged the show as an old world, old school demanding disciplines challenge. If you had brought in someone who was more entertainment, it wouldn't have felt as grounded in actual ballroom lore as it did as soon as you see the old Englishman who's harsh on people.

INABA: I don't come from the ballroom dance world. That was Len Goodman's world. Bruno and I came more from entertainment, choreography, and music. I come from a world arts and cultures background. I grew up in Hawaii where I learned the hula, which is a way of keeping my culture alive and telling stories. It's much more woven into the fabric of our lives than ballroom dancing, which is more of a dance showcase sport. That's what made the panel so balanced — our differing backgrounds.

GREEN: I thought it was interesting to bring in someone who's much more from the commercial dance world, who could understand ballroom but could also speak to something a little bit younger and more modern than what Len was. Carrie Ann had been a Fly Girl. So, she had this whole different set of experiences, and she would also be more relatable to a U.S. audience. Between the three of them, we had this great balance of modern-style entertainment value and core ballroom discipline.

With the three judges locked in, the producing team then needed to figure out the most essential piece of Dancing With the Stars — the stars themselves. They ended up assembling a cast of six individuals spanning the world of professional sports, reality television, actors, supermodels, musicians, and more.

VALOREE PAPSIDERA (Senior Supervising Producer, 2005-present) : I worked with Deena Katz, and we had just finished doing some other shows with ABC. She told me that they had called and said, “Hey, do you think you guys could come up with a cast to do Dancing With the Stars?” They explained it as you just have to get this handful of celebrities to go and train and do ballroom dance. I thought, “That's going to be a real tough one.”

KATZ: The first time is always the hardest because nobody knows what you're doing. I could show videotapes of Strictly, but it's a different sensibility in the U.K.. So, showing it didn't really cross over. People had to take a leap of faith because there was never this kind of show on television. There wasn't that many celebrity-based unscripted shows, and the ones that were out there were the opposite of this feel-good ballroom dance show.

PAPSIDERA: It was going to take a lot of courage for anybody to say yes to doing the show. We were working on it from before it was even officially greenlit, From day one it was, “Wow, could they really make this happen? Can we get people to do this?”

KATZ: There was a sense of, “If you do this, you're never going to work in scripted again. You're never going to do a movie again.” And that is not true. People get movies, series, and hosting gigs afterwards because of being on the show. But it was really hard at first to convince people, “You should do this and I promise you it's not going to hurt you.” It's live, which is also scary. 

PAPSIDERA: I will tell you the day that I knew it was going to be something. This was back in the day when we sent offers via fax machines, and I walked into the office and there was a message on the answering machine from Evander Holyfield’s rep saying that he wanted to do the show. I knew that that was all it was going to take.

KATZ: When Evander Holyfield said yes that he would do the show, we were like, “Wow, we might have something here.” If we're so excited to want to watch Holyfield dance, then so is America. It legitimized it for a lot of people. 

PAPSIDERA: Deena was asking a lot of people and wasn't really getting the traction that I'm sure that she hoped we would get, but once he said yes, it all came together after that.

GREEN: We needed that headline that made people go, “Oh, I've got to do this.”

INABA: Without him we would never have been able to cast all of those football players and all of those guys [over the years] because dance, at that point. was not really widely known to be for men in the social consciousness. I thought it was very brave of him to come out and dance. 

JOHN O’HURLEY (Season 1 runner-up): I got a call from ABC to have lunch. I should’ve been suspicious right away because ABC doesn't call me to have lunch. They opened up the laptop at lunch and showed me the show from England called Strictly Come Dancing, and they were going to do it as a mid-summer replacement series, and would I be interested? I said, “Well, I'll be glad to host it.” And they said, “No, we want you to do it.”

KELLY MONACO (Season 1 champion): I had a letter in my mailbox in my dressing room at General Hospital. We have these little mailboxes outside of our dressing rooms, and there was a letter in there and it was a request to do Dancing with the Stars. I remember bringing it home and getting feedback from family, friends, and so forth, and they were like, “You can't do a reality show. Actors don't do a reality show.”

O’HURLEY: What ABC didn't realize is that I was the guy at the wedding reception who, when the dancing started, I would go and hold up a wall with my glass of Chardonnay and say, “Knock yourselves out.” I was not a dancer and I never pretended to be.

PAPSIDERA: I don't know how many of them understood that we're not making fun of people, and we're putting on this great entertaining show and learning a skill at the same time.

MONACO: I had never heard of ballroom dancing before. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But I was just like, ‘F--- it. I'll try anything once.’ That's how I've always rolled in life. If an opportunity comes, I'll try it.

O’HURLEY: If my imagination pops up with a little picture of me succeeding when I dream about it, I’ve got to do it. My imagination put that picture up there in my head of me succeeding in this, and not even hosting, which would've been the obvious choice, but actually performing.

KATZ: There was no blueprint before season 1 and so you're making it up as you go and having a little bit of everything. At the time, The Bachelorette was huge. Trista Sutter came on and that was our first foray into reality. General Hospital was massive, and Kelly Monaco was a star of it. Daytime audiences are rabid fans. Joey McIntyre is one of the greatest boy-banders of all time and a teenage idol. You want to have that eye candy. John O’Hurley, you didn’t know anything about him. You knew Jay Peterman on Seinfeld. One of the great things about our show is you might know who they are, but you don't really know them. We wanted to try to look at people that have fan bases in different ages and backgrounds, so you're not hitting the same note. It's just trying to give the audience a little bit of everything. To this day we don't audition anybody.  It's still a jigsaw puzzle, even 34 seasons later, of making it the right mix to make sure you're reaching out to the biggest audience. 

With their cast in place, it was time for the first big test — premiere night. They paired the celebrity stars with professional ballroom dancers, gave them an opportunity to rehearse, and gathered a studio audience that they were determined would exhibit a more elegant vibe than what was typically seen on television. On June 1, 2005, they broadcast live from the ballroom for the first time.

KATZ: With our audiences, we made it really clear from day one: "You're getting dressed up, you're going to the ballroom." So when you watch the show, you felt like it was an event more than if just people in their jeans and T-shirts were coming to watch it. It was this cool club that you got to watch what was going on in.

GREEN: 2005 was the era of ripped jeans and Ed Hardy T-shirts in L.A. So, we did have to kick a few people out in the early days because we wanted it to look and feel like something that was a little bit magical.

BERGERON: We had a dinner before the first show that I was invited to with Len, Bruno, Carrie Ann, and Conrad. We all just clicked. It was one of those things. Chemistry is something that you cannot predict or engineer. It's either there or it isn't.

INABA: I met Bruno and Len the first day of the show. We hadn't interacted until the first day of the show. It was one of those moments where you have no idea what you're doing, where you're going, what's happening. It's all new, and it's turned out to be this wonderful journey.

KATZ: Leading up to it it was like, “Is this going to work? Is America going to get behind this?” It was a very cheesy ballroom dance show in the U.K., But when we went live we were like, “This little show is actually something.” You could feel it in the room that night.

BERGERON: I tend to not get nervous about being on camera, but the first show out, anytime you're debuting something, we're all getting our sense of “How is this going to work?” I remember being a bit anxious, and a lot of that was because of the scripted stuff, to be honest. Live is my preferred playground. I had to tell the producers, "It's a live show. It seems weird to have pre-written jokes when I should be responding in real time to what happens."

INABA: That first show I was so scared. This was my first speaking role. I was really, really nervous sitting at that desk. But the judges’ chemistry was there from the first moment. There was something very magical in the sense that we were all from such different backgrounds. I didn't know Len or Bruno at all. There was this mutual respect because they had never done American television. So, I was their big sister as far as coming over into the world of entertainment and television broadcast out here. We needed each other. We helped each other figure out what this was. Len was our loving grandpa, and Bruno was my wild and crazy brother from another mother.