DWTS elimination tonight arrived a night early on Monday, Nov. 2, and Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson made the move count with the first perfect score of Season 35. ABC shifted Dancing With the Stars Season 35 Week 8 ahead of Tuesday night’s election coverage, turning the episode into a compressed live round with scores, routines, and elimination coverage in one hour.
Shum and Johnson hit 40
40 out of 40 is the cleanest number of the night, and it belonged to Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson for a quickstep to 2WEI’s Toxic inspired by Saw. Johnson had called the routine “all about wow moments,” and the dance backed that up with the season’s first perfect score.
37 out of 40 followed for Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy, whose Argentine tango to Uninvited by Damned Anthem and Kendra Dantes drew from 28 Weeks Later. Connor Wood and Rylee Arnold matched that total for a contemporary routine to You Are My Sunshine by Charles McDonald inspired by Annabelle: Creation, and they picked up their first 10s of the season.
Shirley Ballas changes the board
Shirley Ballas joined Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough, and Bruno Tonioli as guest judge, and her scoring pulled the night in a harsher direction than the regular panel usually does. She warned that her scores would be “frightening,” then handed out several 4s and 5s, which tightened the leaderboard and made the middle of the pack harder to read than a standard Week 8 episode.
Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess landed near the bottom after a Viennese Waltz to Annie Lennox’s Love Song for a Vampire inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That leaves the live elimination recap with a complication: Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess were mentioned at the bottom of the leaderboard, but the excerpt does not identify the eliminated contestant.
Week 8 leaves one question
The move to Monday gave viewers the competition before the usual schedule was displaced by election coverage, and the scoring made the episode matter beyond the gimmick of an early air date. The season’s first perfect 40, Ballas’s unusually severe marks, and the bottom-half placement for Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess turned the live hour into a real sorting point for the season.
The one unanswered piece is the elimination itself. The episode delivered the leaderboard, but the name of the dancer who went home is still the missing fact in this Week 8 snapshot.
