TV Guide Interviews Dancing With The Stars Tom Bergeron On Season 17, The Guest Judges, and More

TV Guide interviewed Dancing With The Stars host Tom Bergeron. Tom talks of the new format and what last week’s first elimination was like crunched into one show. He also gives his thoughts on some of the performances as well as the personality differences between Kelly and Jack Osbourne. Heads up…another guest judge is coming up too (besides Julianne Hough). Tom can’t say who it is yet, but, he’s excited. MORE below and at TV Guide.

Last week was the first of cramming the performances and eliminations into one show. How did it go?
Bergeron: I think that’s the one area where it was evident that we haven’t done this before. The timing was a little crunched up. We don’t have quite the time to spend with the couple that we’ve just said goodbye to, because then we go into a whole recap of all the survivors. I think we’ll probably chat about how to make that a little smoother, but for the first time out of the gate, it wasn’t that bad. We got off on time. We got off so Castle could get the proposal done. (Laughs).

Yeah, it got a little rushed at the end as Keyshawn was saying farewell.
Bergeron: That’s part of the fun of live TV, that you can see some little wires hanging from behind the curtain. You can see some of the mechanics of it. From the standpoint of us in the show, there’s no need to be bashful about, “This is how it works, boys and girls.” As we move through the season and we have a bit more time because there are fewer couples, that kind of thing that happened last [week] will be less of an issue. We’ll be able to, later in the season, bring in some musical acts and things of that nature that you typically would have seen on a Tuesday show.

What about the new layout of the ballroom and structure of the judges’ feedback? Is that working well?
Bergeron: It’s a little strange. The feng shui of it all, being on the other side of the ballroom and having Carrie Ann closer to me than Bruno. … But I kind of like having everything happen right away, so [the dancers] get their comments, they get their scores, we can chitchat briefly. But yeah, it’s a little weird being on that side of the ballroom.

We learned last week that Julianne Hough will be a guest judge later in the season. Has anyone else been finalized?
Bergeron: There’ll be at least one other guest judge, and I can’t give you a name [because] I don’t know that the contracts have been signed. But if it’s the person they told me is likely to do it, I’m very excited about that.