Dancing With The Stars Season 26 Gets New “Showrunner”

According to Hollywood Reporter, X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent veteran Andrew Llinares will take over as showrunner for the forthcoming all-athletes edition of Dancing With the Stars. Interesting. Read on….

Llinares also launched and exec produced Britain’s Got Talent — the show on which Susan Boyle’s performance became a viral sensation. He started his career as a journalist before moving to television at Granada Television in the U.K. He also exec produced and directed Pop Idol, the forerunner to American Idol.

“The challenge is to find a way to hold on to the key values of the show, while moving it forward while keeping current and fresh,” Llinares says of his goals for DWTS. “It’s definitely about evolution rather than revolution. Story and emotion are absolutely key for me. With that in mind, I want us to find ways to make the stories on the show even more compelling and the emotional connection which the viewer has to the performances, even stronger. I also want us to come up with ideas that surprise and excite the viewers every week so that they keep coming back for more.”

The forthcoming 26th season of Dancing With the Stars will be an all-athletes edition, with Llinares declining to reveal his dream gets for the cast — an obvious go-to would be Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon — but he hopes the themed season will bring an “entirely new dynamic” to the veteran series. “Over the years, many athletes who’ve participated as the celebrity dancers on DWTS have gone on to win the Mirror Ball trophy; they are used to training and competing, so they tend to do very well. I think we’ll see an intensity and level of competition that we may never have seen before on the show.”

More at Hollywood Reporter.