Former Dancing With the Stars host Brooke Burke was initially caught off guard when she was let go from the ballroom competition show.
“My times in the ballroom were epic and amazing. I have such great memories and relationships. It’s really the industry,” Burke, 54, recalled on the Thursday, September 3, episode of Tamsen Fadal’s eponymous podcast. “I mean, my contract was up. It was being renegotiated, but it was happening; my dressing room was being painted. It wasn’t, like, we were waiting for a negotiation.”
Suddenly, Burke received a call from production that “they were making a change” and she “wouldn’t be returning.”
After competing and winning DWTS season 7 in 2008, Burke joined longtime cohost Tom Bergeron in the skybox for eight seasons from 2010 to 2014. (Burke was replaced by fellow former contestant Erin Andrews, who was ousted alongside Bergeron, 71, in 2020 due to ABC going in a “new creative direction” before Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough took over hosting duties.)
As for Burke, she was plagued with self-doubt after being axed from the ABC competition series.
“There was a change that was taking place, and I did go through that inner dialogue … ‘Was it me? Nobody that loves you breaks up with you,’” she admitted. “I was like, ‘If they really loved me so much, was I good enough? What kind of work was I really bringing to the ballroom? Was it my age? Are they looking for a change? Was it culture? Was it ethnicity?’ There’s all kinds of things that happened.”
Burke continued, “Because I had such a great experience, that makes it even more complicated. So, I had to chalk it up as, ‘That’s the industry and sometimes it’s time for change.’ Maybe there was a bigger reason, unknown to me, which is the hard part of navigating the industry.”
For Burke, she acknowledged that she’s a person who will “accept whatever’s coming [her] way” and propel herself forward.
“In [the] best case scenario, I was sort of like, ‘Ooh, I’ve been here for eight years. I won Dancing with the Stars somehow, [which was] amazing. I had the privilege and the blessing to host the show, now what am I going to do?’” the TV personality recalled. “‘Am I going to New York? Am I going to go do talk [shows]? What’s my next step?’ I had four children at home … and my commitment as a mother, I wasn’t gonna really explore a lot of the opportunities because I wanted to be home, first and foremost. My priority was to be a mother.”
Burke, who shares Neriah and Sierra with Garth Fisher and Heaven and Shaya with David Charvet, further claimed that she never got a definitive reason about why she was cut from the ballroom.
“There really wasn’t an answer other than that they wanted to make a change,” she said. “I think the host that they chose was very relevant at the time … with Erin, she did an absolutely fine job. Change is hard though in an industry [and], kind of, being a princess of the ballroom and having the trophy and hosting and having great relationships and loving the pros.”
