This past Monday, ABC launched season 15 of one of America’s top-watched shows, Dancing With the Stars; however, with this season was not filled with any new celebrities, but returning champions and fan favorites to re-earn and re-defend their titles. The partnerships for this season were comprised mostly of new pairings, although, there were some old partnerships brought back together as well. I have provided the cast list below:

• Apolo Anton Ohno (partnered with Karina Smirnoff)
• Bristol Palin (partnered with Mark Ballas)
• Drew Lachey (partnered with Anna Trebunskaya)
• Emmitt Smith (partnered with Cheryl Burke)
• Gilles Marini (partnered with Peta Murgatroyd)
• Helio Castroneves (partnered with Chelsie Hightower)
• Joey Fatone (partnered with Kym Johnson)
• Kelly Monaco (partnered with Valentin “Val” Chmerkovskiy)
• Kirstey Alley (partnered with Maksim “Maks” Chmerkovskiy)
• Melissa Rycroft (partnered with Tony Dovolani)
• Pamela Anderson (partnered with Tristan MacManus)
• Sabrina Bryan (partnered with Louis Van Amstel)
• Shawn Johnson (partnered with Derek Hough)

Even though these contestants are not new to the season, a new scoring system is. The judges now have “.5” decimal paddles, giving the ability to the score to not be a whole number, but closer to a certain whole number. This certainly took me by surprise the first time I saw a score with a .5 in it.

What do you think of the new scoring system on DWTS? Let us know in this posts’s comments section.

There were a lot of break-out routines during the course of the show; however, one of the routines that received excellent praise and was awarded was Emmitt Smith and Cheryl Burke’s cha-cha (shown below):

As the season goes, someone has to go home. For the first “All-Stars” season results show, the first celebrity dancer who was eliminated was Pamela Anderson, who received a low score of 17 the night before. Anderson’s elimination sure stirred up some mixed reaction on Twitter: