‘Dancing With the Stars’: Why Melissa Joan Hart ‘Hated’ Being on the Show

Over a decade after she competed on Dancing With the Stars, Melissa Joan Hart is opening up about her experience. On a recent episode of her podcast Where Women Binge, which featured fellow DWTS alum Jana Kramer as a guest, she explained that there was a big reason why she “hated” her time on the program. She also shared that she was originally supposed to be on the first season of the show before work and life commitments came into play. 

Hart mentioned that she was going to be in the inaugural season of the dancing competition, as Heavy noted. However, because she was under contract with FOX, she was unable to compete. Then, she couldn’t compete in the next few seasons of the show because she was pregnant. Once she was able to join the cast for Season 9, she soon realized that the competition wasn’t exactly what she expected. 

During the course of the season, Hart caught the flu a week after the rest of the cast came under the weather. As she explained, this illness lead to her elimination. Even before this unfortunate situation, Hart “hated” her time on the show. The actor said, “I thought it was going to be more dancing. I didn’t like the production moments.” She said that there were certain occasions when she would have to repeat herself when the camera missed something. Since she was focused on learning her routines, this ended up affecting her performances. 

Hart joined DWTS because all she “wanted to be was a dancer.” She may have been proud of her jive routine with partner Mark Ballas, but she still doesn’t look back on the experience fondly. The Sabrina the Teenage Witch alum said, “And here I was, I hated myself when I watched it back because I’m not a dancer.” She also didn’t take kindly to what the judges had to say about her first routine, saying, “I didn’t expect to hate the judges as much as I did.” In the end, Hart and Kramer ended the podcast episode by bonding over their respective DWTS stints.

“Whenever I talk to people, they’re like, ‘It was the best time!’ and I’m like, ‘Am I the only one who had a rough time with it?’” Hart asked. Kramer replied, “No, you’re not.”