DWTS Juniors Pros Elliana Walmsley & Sage Rosen Spill “Tea” on the Show; Court Reacts

So a reader shot me a Twitter DM this morning, containing the link to a YouTube video and asking “Is all this true?” I thought it would be a casting rumor for the upcoming season, given the timing; you can imagine my surprise when I saw that it was a “tea spilling” video from two of the child pros from DWTS Juniors – the one-and-done season they did 3 whole years ago. I watched it; most of what was said wasn’t entirely new or groundbreaking (and I think we already spilled a lot of this same “tea” here 3 years ago), but I thought I’d go ahead and do a reaction post…hell, there ain’t much else going on right now. With the ‘rona still a-ragin’, it might be good for my psyche to flash back to a simpler time!

First thoughts: whoa. THAT’S little Elliana? She looks very…grown up. Or maybe teenagers just looked different when I was her age? We Millennials all went through an awkward teen phase where our makeup was terrible…Elliana’s generation seems to have skipped the white eyeliner, glitter face gel, and metallic lipstick phase…probably thanks to YouTube and beauty influencers. Sage looks the same…maybe a little more mature in the face.

Sooo…they’re “scared” of getting in trouble with the DWTS producers? Then why are you making this video, guys? For what its worth, I doubt the DWTS Juniors producers care…the show got cancelled, and I think many of them from that time period have either gotten canned or have moved onto other ventures by now. But when in doubt – don’t do anything that might sabotage future work opportunities, kids.

First “tea” they spill: the kids apparently “couldn’t talk to or see each other”, and were prevented from interacting with with other couples/pros when they weren’t filming group dances or intros. This was one of the few things they said that was news to me. And it may sound harsh (especially to kids, who are chatterboxes), but DWTSJ is not the first show I’ve heard of that has had this policy. I know the queens on Rupaul’s Drag Race are forbidden from talking to each other when the cameras aren’t rolling, because production wants to be able to catch any and all interactions to potentially use them on the show later. In the case of these kids, I honestly think it was just done to try (in vain) to prevent leaks – the less the kids are allowed to interact, the less they know, and the less they’re able to potentially leak to friends, the internet, etc. In the end, I think it was all for naught, because those kids were posting potentially spoiler-y pix on social media left and right, and lord knows I had zero issues getting spoilers from people who were in the audience at the tapings. NDA who? Don’t know her…

Second spot of tea: some of the parents were “kinda crazy”, or, as Sage put it “low-key psycho”. Ableist terminology notwithstanding, this was not really news to me – I had heard a few anecdotes about some of them being pushy stage parents, which isn’t really all that surprising when you take into account that many of them are acting as their kids’ de facto managers. I don’t know who specifically they are referring to when they talk about a mom “blowing up” on set and being “escorted out”, but my money’s on either Bristol Palin (Tripp’s mom) or “Mama June” Shannon (Alana’s mom). The former allegedly signed her kid up for the show without telling him, and he only found out on the day of his first rehearsal when Bristol dropped him off at the studio (I recall being told it was an awkward, tearful, and understandably tantrum-filled first meeting); the latter just struck me as a bit twitchy around that time, and I remember some lightly veiled threat she made to Artem & Tristan about “treating Alana appropriately” or something like that during their first meeting. I also recall June being arrested and then entering rehab for an ongoing drug problem a year or so after Juniors, so that could explain any potentially unhinged behavior she might have displayed on set.

Tea #3: Sage technically wasn’t allowed to be on the show. Can confirm – the age cutoff for the initial auditions in Jan/Feb of 2018 was 13, and Sage was already 14 at that point. That’s why I think a lot of readers were like “Who the heck is Sage Rosen?” when we first leaked the list of junior pros – he wasn’t even one of the faces we saw at the auditions, because his age automatically disqualified him. However, I was told that once they got around to casting the actual kid celebs, it became obvious that they would clearly need someone a bit older for Kenzie – so Sage got the call, along with Jake Monreal, who I think had the advantage of being Jenna’s partner on SYTYCD two summers prior. Could also be “there just weren’t enough decent boy dancers”, like Elliana mentioned; if the only boys cast in the second audition went to the troupe, she must be referring to Cody Bingham and Sebastian Jozuka, who I think were both on the younger side and probably not ready for the responsibility of being pros.

Tea(ish?) numero quattro: the kids had to wear these super heavy mics they had to wear that were strapped on them like a waist trainer. Don’t recall hearing anything about those, probably because it’s what I’d consider a rather mundane detail that our readers wouldn’t be particularly interested in knowing.  But given how much attention the crew was paying to child labor laws, I’m a bit surprised they had the kids lugging around heavy, restrictive mic sets with the potential to burn them. Sage also talks about feeling like he couldn’t really say much because he was mic’d at all times – this could explain why I feel like he barely said 100 words all season long.

Spot of tea #5: Someone fell off the stage. I vaguely remember something along those lines being mentioned to me – but I think my source glossed over it as just a funny blooper where nobody got seriously hurt so it wasn’t really even worth mentioning. I will say that I always found that star-shaped stage to be an accident waiting to happen…I’ve been through enough OSHA audits to know that they really frown upon raised platforms without guardrails, let alone ones in awkward shapes. It being JT or Artyon sounds plausible – I recall hearing them described as two of the younger, more boisterous and spirited of the kid pros, and they had a LOT of energy.

Tea #6: They taped two shows per week.  Yep – we knew this. With the exception of the first week (when they only taped one episode), the couples would have Monday-Wednesday to learn and rehearse two dances, camera blocking would happen on Thursday, taping of one week’s show on Friday, taping of the subsequent week’s show on Saturday, and by law, all the kids had to have Sunday off. I think there was one week where they had to camera block AND tape an episode on a Thursday, and then the next one on Friday, because Kenzie had some commitment on Saturday of that week. They basically shot a full 9-week season in one month – the breakneck taping speed owing to the fact that they needed to wrap everything up before the kids had to head back to school in late August.

Tea #7: There were some partner changes. No news here – I remember being told originally that Makeila Lawrence was going to be a junior pro, then told about a week later that no, she had gotten moved to the troupe, because she was too tall for not only her partner, but the rest of the male junior celebs as well. What’s funny to me is that the crew seemed to not understand the fundamental difference in growth spurts between adolescent boys and girls – the girls have theirs a couple years before the boys do, so it’s not really all that unusual to have girls that tower over boys the same age. I feel like Miles was always supposed to be with Rylee, though, despite the height difference – or maybe I’m just projecting, since I predicted them as a partnership a full year before they even started casting Juniors 😉

Tea #8: Kids would cry in the skybox if they got bad scores. Um, duh. There were a lot of tears.  Probably because they were kids that hadn’t yet learned to manage their emotions in the same fashion as adults. Really shocking tea you’re dropping on us, guys 😉 But for what it’s worth – some those kids handled defeat far better than some of the adults we’ve had on DWTS.  I recall Akash being particularly gracious and mature when he got eliminated.

Final tea: The voting remotes were janky.  Again, nothing we didn’t already suspect – I had heard stories about them altogether not working and crew members hastily distributing pencil and paper to the audience, and suspicions that they probably weren’t working all that well for the remainder of the season. In the end, I doubt it mattered much – I remember people in the audience at the finale saying it was clear that Sky & JT were the favorites to win, and the fact that there was no cash prize means the show didn’t really have to worry so much about “voting integrity” like they do on the adult version.

Final thoughts? I’m guessing Sage needed content for his channel, and they didn’t have anything else going on – hence the room-temperature tea from a show that ended 3 years ago. It’s a little annoying to me that they seemed to paint the experience in a somewhat negative light, given that a lot of those kids seemed to be having the time of their life up there and I think it was probably the first big gig as a dancer that some of them booked; but hindsight is 20/20, so in retrospect, maybe they’re seeing the cracks. Oh well.