DWTS Split Its Cast by Gender for the Premiere. Fans Say It's Not a Fair Fight.

Season 35 of "Dancing With the Stars" premieres over two nights, September 15 and 16 — and before a single dance has aired, the show has already picked a fight with its own fanbase. ABC is reviving a premiere-week elimination format it hasn't used since 2018, splitting the cast by gender and sending one woman home after night one, then one man home after night two.

On September 15, the women of the cast — including Tatyana Ali, Jenna Dewan, Giada De Laurentiis, Amber Glenn, Maura Higgins, and Ciara Miller — compete against each other, with one eliminated that night. On September 16, the men — among them Taylor Hanson, Jackson Olson, Ezra Frech, Tyler Cameron, Harry Shum Jr., and Guillermo Rodriguez — take the floor, with one of them cut afterward. Unlike the 2018 version of this twist, this season adds the gender divide on top of it, meaning contestants aren't just facing early elimination — they're only competing against half the cast to get there.

Professional dancer Mark Ballas said the quiet part out loud: "It's not even an even playing field, right? It's, like, the cast is split in half." His partner this season, Maura Higgins — best known from "Love Island UK" — was blunt about the pressure it puts on night one specifically: "That is so scary. Yeah, I have to work hard." Higgins is dancing a foxtrot to Alannah Myles' 1989 track "Black Velvet" for her birth-year routine, one of several personal touches built into this season's format.

The math is the actual complaint: in a normal premiere, everyone dances and the bottom performers face each other regardless of gender. Splitting the field means a woman with a rough night one could go home before ever getting compared to how the men actually did the next night — and vice versa. It's a format built for drama and two nights of appointment television, which is exactly what critics say it's optimized for at the expense of a fair competition.

Two people are gone before the season properly starts — one from each side of the cast, eliminated on a format the show hasn't touched in eight years and never with quite this structure. Whether it becomes a one-week gimmick or a genuine shakeup of how the show builds tension going forward depends entirely on how loud this week's backlash gets.