Carrie Ann Inaba wants Dancing With the Stars to draw a clearer line on lifts next season after criticizing Jenna Johnson and Harry Shum Jr. for one in their Super Bowl Night routine. She raised the issue after the Oct. 13 performance, then put the rule change into writing on Oct. 25.
“A new lift rule should be created for next season,” Inaba wrote in an Oct. 25 Instagram comment. She said she wanted “a session with all the dancers and the judges in a room together to discuss the history of how and why Len Goodman, our original producers and I defined the lift rule and what the purpose is, which is safety and fairness.”
Jenna Johnson on clarity
On Oct. 27, Johnson told E! News, “I would love that. That would be amazing. I think that it would help all of us pros. I also saw that comment, and I really appreciated it.” She added, “We should,” after the idea of a clearer lift policy came up again, a rare point of agreement in a dispute that has already spilled beyond one routine.
The shift matters because Inaba also said the show has “evolved tremendously,” adding that the way it is cast has changed and so has the audience. That is the practical problem now: a rule written around one version of the show has to survive a newer one without making judging feel arbitrary.
Harry Shum Jr. and the lift
Inaba’s criticism landed on a specific contradiction. Her definition of the prohibited move referred to one dancer being supported by a partner, but Harry Shum Jr. was lifted by the troupe, not by Johnson alone. That is why the argument has not stayed confined to a single score sheet; it has turned into a rules question.
Shum said after the Halloween Night episode that he and Johnson were not expecting the reaction from Shirley Ballas, even though the routine earned a perfect score. “We don't do this show for validation, but that was the best validation of having someone like her to get the feedback and talk about kind of what she loved about it,” he said. “But we weren't expecting it.”
He also said to Johnson, “I know how much it means to you,” and added, “also for me, as someone who came late to the game, like watching Shirley on Next Pro, and then going back and watching her videos, I'm like, 'Oh my god!'” That reaction put the performance in a different category from the lift complaint: the routine was rewarded, but the rule itself is now under scrutiny.
Val Chmerkovskiy adds a second layer to the fallout. He received a one-week suspension after making an unsavory reference to the Oscars moment between Will Smith and Chris Rock in a TikTok post, while Val Chmerkovskiy and Jenna Dewan were paired on the season. Jenna Dewan also moved and grooved with Alan Bersten for Dedication Night, which makes the rule discussion less about one pair and more about how the show wants to police choreography across the cast.
The next step is not the score from Oct. 13 or the reaction from Oct. 27. It is whether Dancing With the Stars turns Inaba’s ask into an actual lift standard, and the show should. If it wants safety and fairness to mean the same thing to dancers and judges, it needs wording that can hold up when the movement gets more complicated than a simple partner lift.
