Giada dancing with the stars finally became reality when Giada De Laurentiis said yes to Season 35 and joined Dancing With the Stars with Alan Bersten. After years of turning the show down, her move shifts a familiar Food Network face into a competition that rewards weekly visibility as much as skill.
Season 35 and Alan Bersten
Season 35 is the first time she has stepped in, and the pairing with Bersten gives the run an immediate competitive frame. For a television personality built outside that format, the season now becomes a live test of how far a chef can go once the choreography is no longer optional.
The practical detail is simple: she is in the cast, and Bersten is the partner assigned to carry the weekly load on the floor. That leaves the rest of the season to judge her by performance rather than by the long reluctance that kept her out of the competition before now.
Shane Farley and 2013
Shane Farley matters here because he is not just a boyfriend in the background; he is the longtime partner whose history with her reaches back to 2013. He was hired then to help produce a show for De Laurentiis and Bobby Flay, and the two later reconnected and started dating a couple of years later after she divorced Todd Thompson in 2015.
Farley also spoke publicly in 2018 about his first impression of her, saying, “I just thought she was really smart and funny and I thought, 'God, she would be a great host for a show.'” That comment now reads less like a throwaway line and more like an early signal of how closely their professional and personal lives have stayed linked.
A source close to the situation told the Daily Mail that Farley is a “total control freak” and described him as De Laurentiis’ “boyfriend, manager, agent, bodyguard and publicist all rolled into one.” The same source said he is trying to control her time on Dancing With the Stars, adding that he behaves like she is “Taylor Swift with a frying pan,” with everything treated like an enormous event and “everything has to go through Shane.”
The control claim is the complication around a straightforward casting move. If Farley is as involved as the source says, then Season 35 is not just a dance assignment; it becomes a test of how much space De Laurentiis gets inside a schedule that now belongs to the show, Bersten, and the live competition format. That is the part worth watching, because the pair has been together for more than a decade and the professional overlap has never been cleaner.
Farley’s own résumé gives the story more weight. He has won four Emmys, which is exactly why his presence around her TV work can read as guidance to some and interference to others. Whether that dynamic changes once the season moves deeper into competition is the unresolved part, and it sits right next to her actual run for the Mirrorball Trophy.
