Perfect-score timeline & scoring inflation across 35 seasons
S1 mean 7.514 with 2 perfects → S19 mean 8.187 with 17 perfects; 353 perfect dances all-time.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
Judges got warmer mid-run: Season 1 averaged 7.514 per judge with 2 perfect dances; Season 19 averaged 8.187 with 17 perfects and 38% of dances at mean ≥9. Era means: S1–10 7.881, S11–20 8.196, S21–30 7.975, S31–35 7.548. We count 353 perfect dances (all judges ≥10, ≥3 judges) all-time in this build.
Findings
- Inflation is not monotone. Early seasons climb, mid-teens/20s spike (4-judge nights and guest weeks matter), then recent seasons cool relative to the S19 peak.
- Perfect counts track the same arc — sparse early, denser in the late teens/20s.
- Scale changes (3 vs 4 judges) are handled by using per-judge means; raw totals are not compared across eras.
Methods & caveats
Perfect = every retained judge mark on a performance is ≥10 with at least 3 judges. America’s Score excluded. Guest-heavy weeks can lift both means and perfect counts (see story 10).
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
