Week six of Dancing with the Stars was always going to be emotional. Dedication Night is the evening the ballroom sets technique aside and asks its ten remaining celebrities to dance for the people who made them — and on Tuesday, October 20, season 35 delivered the theme’s most unforgettable edition in years: a pregnancy announcement folded into a routine, a gender reveal on the dance floor, a leaderboard topped by a near-perfect score, and an elimination segment that ended with nobody going home at all.
The night arrived under a cloud. Pro Val Chmerkovskiy, suspended for one week after a deleted social media post about judge Carrie Ann Inaba, was absent, and co-host Alfonso Ribeiro addressed it in just seven words near the top of the show: “Val is not with us this week.” His partner, Jenna Dewan, danced instead with Alan Bersten, the pro eliminated earlier this season, who had only days to learn a routine built for somebody else. By the end of the night, though, the controversy had been completely overtaken by the dancing.
A Pregnancy Announcement Hidden Inside a Dance
The moment everyone will remember belonged to Tyler Cameron. The former Bachelorette star performed a contemporary routine with pro Sharna Burgess to Ed Sheeran’s “Supermarket Flowers,” a song written about a mother’s death, and dedicated it to mothers everywhere — above all his own mother, Andrea, who died in 2020. Cameron’s fiancée, Tate Madden, joined the performance, and as the dance unfolded, the couple revealed the news they had been keeping: Madden is pregnant with their first child.
They did not stop there. The announcement became a full gender reveal live on the broadcast, confirming the baby is a girl. Cameron, visibly overwhelmed, summed it up afterwards: “I get to be a girl dad. What a gift, what an opportunity.” It was a dedication to a mother who is gone, transformed into a celebration of a daughter who is coming — and the ballroom, judges included, was in tears. The judges awarded the routine 32 out of 40, the night’s most modest score, but nobody in the building pretended the number was the point.
(WBNX-TV 55 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))Amber Glenn Tops a Leaderboard Full of Feeling
The night’s highest score went to Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn, whose contemporary dance with Pasha Pashkov earned 38 out of 40. Glenn dedicated the routine to her sister Brooke, who stood by her through a period of serious mental-health struggles, and the performance drew the evening’s strongest marks from a four-person panel that included returning guest judge Kym Johnson-Herjavec alongside Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli.
Just behind her, Paralympic champion Ezra Frech and Daniella Karagach scored 37 for a dance dedicated to Frech’s mother, Bahar — a routine that earned the first 10 of the entire season. And then there was Jenna Dewan. Dancing a Viennese waltz to “Unchained Melody” dedicated to her mother, Nancy, who joined her on the floor, Dewan and Bersten also scored 37 — including a 10 from Inaba, the very judge at the center of the week’s controversy. Watching from home, Chmerkovskiy commented “Perfection” on the show’s post of the dance and thanked Bersten for stepping in.
(FloweringDagwood / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))Reunions, Tributes and a Nod to Dolly
Actress Julia Stiles dedicated her dance with Ezra Sosa to her late co-star and friend Heath Ledger, and the end of the routine turned into a genuine reunion: her 10 Things I Hate About You castmates, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Gabrielle Union, surrounded her on the floor. Stiles and Sosa scored 36, level with Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson. Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas earned 35, while Tatyana Ali, Jackson Olson and Connor Wood joined Cameron on 32. The cast also paid tribute to the late Dolly Parton with a set to “Here You Come Again,” a farewell woven into an evening already heavy with remembrance.
(Howie / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))The Elimination Shock: Nobody Went Home
Then came the twist the episode title promised. After all ten couples had danced and the votes were in, Ribeiro and co-host Julianne Hough ran the elimination as usual — before announcing that every single couple was safe. “On such a special night, we didn’t want anyone sent home,” Hough explained, as the ballroom erupted. The catch: the week’s scores carry over, and next week’s Horror Movie Night, on October 27, will end in a double elimination. Dedication Night gave everyone a reprieve. It also doubled the stakes of everything that comes next.
The Full Picture on a Packed Leaderboard
Behind the headline moments, the rest of the field quietly laid down markers of its own. Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson, dancing a week after their samba became the center of the judging controversy, scored 36 and looked determined to let the dancing answer everything. Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas earned 35, while the four-way tie at 32 — Tatyana Ali with Jan Ravnik, Jackson Olson with Emma Slater, Connor Wood with Rylee Arnold, and Cameron with Sharna Burgess — bunched half the field into the danger zone that next week’s double elimination will now decide. With scores carried forward, the gap between the top and the bottom of the board is just six points, close enough for one strong Halloween performance to reorder everything.
The dedications themselves ranged across parents, siblings, hometowns and lost friends, and several of the people being honored joined the routines on the floor, a Dedication Night tradition that turns the ballroom into something closer to a family reunion than a studio. Guest judge Kym Johnson-Herjavec, a two-time champion returning to the panel, urged the couples beforehand to embrace the moment because nights like this are special, and the field took her literally. By the time the hosts began the elimination segment, the audience had cried through nearly two hours of television — which is, of course, exactly why the producers chose that moment to announce that nobody was leaving. The reprieve lasts seven days. Horror Movie Night, and its double elimination, arrives on October 27.