Former Dancing with the Stars host Samantha Harris was told by execs that she was “too tan and too toned.” She claims they told her to “gain weight” before being fired from the show.
Samantha co-hosted the dance competition show alongside Tom Bergeron from 2006 to 2009, Season 2 through Season 9. During her tenure, producers also told her that viewers were mistaking her for a professional dancer and it was “confusing” them.
Can a TV host ever really be “too tan and too toned?” On December 10, Samantha bared all to former DWTS pro Cheryl Burke on her Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast.
Physical appearance is everything on TV
She felt show executives were telling her, “You need to be pasty and pudgy … Usually you’re told to lose weight. I was actually told to gain weight.”
Samantha, a dedicated vegan and breast cancer survivor, says she “took a lot of pride” in her appearance and still does to this day. She eats a plant-based diet, which can make you thin. But Samantha had a secret up her sleeve. Though she hadn’t yet told her bosses, “I was pregnant so I wasn’t going to be tanning,” she told Cheryl. “And I was going to be gaining weight. So there ya go.”
But not long afterward, Samantha was summoned to another meeting. Conrad Green, the show’s executive producer announced that she would not be returning for Season 10. He told her that the “network executives have decided that they need something to look different on the show.”
“They need something really different to keep eyeballs watching,” the motivational speaker recalled. “So the thing that the network came up with is, ‘Well, the first thing you see when you turn on the TV are the hosts. So let’s change one of them.’”
At the time, Samantha was also working as a correspondent at Entertainment Tonight. She and ABC made the decision together to explain her exit as an opportunity to focus on her reporting.
Cheryl and Samantha became friends when they both started on DWTS at the same time in 2006, Samantha as a host and Cheryl as a pro dancer. Cheryl announced her retirement from the dancing competition in November 2022, calling her departure “one of the absolute hardest decisions.”
TELL US – DO YOU THINK SAMANTHA SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRED FOR HER APPEARANCE? DO MEN EVER GET PINK-SLIPPED FOR THEIR PHYSICAL APPEARANCE?
