Sarah Jane Nader became the second celebrity to leave season 35 of Dancing With the Stars on Wednesday night, ending the women’s half of the two-night premiere with a final elimination. She was partnered with Hailey Bills, and the exit came after a show built around first-week scores and viewer votes.
The result matters because the premiere had already been shaped on Tuesday, when the men opened the season and Conner Leavitt was sent home at the end of the live show. Wednesday’s episode put the female celebrities on the floor, and the leaderboard quickly showed how tight the race was. Amber Glenn and Pasha Pashkov opened with 18/30, then Julia Stiles and Ezra Sosa matched that mark with a quickstep to Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5. Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas pushed higher, becoming the first female pair of the season to earn seven paddles from all judges and finishing with 21/30 to top the women’s side.
The premiere was also notable for what happened off the dance floor. ABC’s website crashed during the Tuesday live show, and voting had to continue only by text, a problem that made the first night feel even more exposed than usual. Alfonso Ribeiro told viewers that the show was only accepting votes via text for Tuesday’s premiere, leaving the process to run on a narrower lane than planned.
That detail matters because the season opened with a format that leaves little margin for error. The two-night premiere split the cast by gender, with one elimination each night, and the contestants were dancing to a No. 1 song from the year they were born. Harry Shum Jr. led the men on Tuesday with 21/30, but Wednesday belonged to the women’s field and to the first cut that came with it. For Sarah Jane Nader, the night ended not with a breakout score but with the season’s second exit.
The opening two nights also showed that season 35 arrived with a larger audience than last year. The first premiere episode drew 6.67 million viewers, up 24 percent from 5.38 million a year earlier, and it was the most-watched debut since season 29 in September 2020. What comes next is simple: the remaining contestants move out of the split premiere and into the rest of the season, carrying the night’s scores, the vote scramble and Wednesday’s elimination with them.
