Dancing on Air
ABC's summer hit looks like a mid-season success story, too

When we saw the ratings for the Dancing with the Stars dance-off in September, we thought America's summer love affair with ballroom dancing was history. We were wrong. A bigger, better Dancing came back on Jan. 5, attracting 17.5 million viewers and a healthy chunk of the 18-to-49-year-olds whom advertisers love. We talked to Andrea Wong, who oversees reality programming for ABC, about the surprise hit of the summer, which now looks like it will be a mid-season ratings game-changer for ABC.

TVGuide.com: That was some opening night.
Andrea Wong: We're optimistic. I love the show, and I'm glad that people are responding to it.

TVGuide.com: It looked to me like you've made some changes since the first one.
Wong: The No. 1 thing we changed was the voting system and having a results show so that viewers could vote on the same dances the judges were scoring. That was a major change and that was a response to what people were saying last time. They didn't like that the public voting was based on last week's dance combined with the judging of the current week's dance. So now the judges' and the public [response] are based on the same dances. And we expanded the number of celebrities and episodes.

TVGuide.com: Were you surprised by the backlash against the show when Kelly Monaco was crowned as the winner instead of John O'Hurley?
Wong: I think the backlash was more from the critics than the viewers. The response to the dance-off told us that the critics cared more than the viewers did.

TVGuide.com: The dance-off didn't do as well as you expected.
Wong: It was in a tough time period because it was a premiere week and all the scripted shows were coming out against it. But had the viewers felt as strongly as [the critics led us to believe] at the press tour [last summer], you would have expected the ratings to be higher.

TVGuide.com: Did it make you think for a moment that maybe the show was a flash in the pan?
Wong: No. American Idol specials also tend not to do well. But what you are nervous about is that you're bringing the show out against original, tougher competition, which it doesn't have to go against in the summer, so that's why it was particularly gratifying that the show did so well [last] Thursday.

TVGuide.com: Was it a concern that Master P didn't show up with his A-game on the first episode?
Wong: In fairness, he had only a week to practice, while everybody else had a lot more time, so we'll see this week. Clearly people liked him, because he was in last place in the judges' score but he didn't get knocked out [of the competition].

TVGuide.com: What's the next trend in reality TV? What types of pitches are you getting these days?
Wong:  I think we have to keep being distinctive and try new forms. I think it's up to us to keep reinventing the genre, now more than ever. I'm looking for nonderivative formats. In other words, the challenge/elimination shows are very hard right now. There have been so many of them. The Bachelor still has a very loyal core audience for the relationship genre — but that form has been imitated so many times, I don't think it's possible to launch another one of them. That said, I think the relationship genre is a highly resonant one. It's a matter of figuring out a different way to get at it, which we're trying to do.

TVGuide.com: The ratings for the premiere of The Bachelor showed that young female viewers still seek it out.
Wong: There is still juice left in it; there is still a core audience that loved that show. The numbers for women aged 18 to 34 were very strong. It was the first one in its form and the purest one. So I think there's a lot of life left in it.

TVGuide.com: Are you focusing on trying to find another relationship show?
Wong: That's one of the things. But we're looking at all different kinds of things right now. Different forms. Just like Dancing was completely out of the blue when we decided to do that, we're trying to find a completely different way of storytelling.

TVGuide.com: Not getting any easier?
Wong: It's harder than ever right now. We are at a crossroads where we've got to shake things up.