What’s Worth Watching: Dancing With the Stars Kicks Off Season 20

Matt Roush March 16, 2015, 6:00 am

Dancing With the Stars, Season premiere (Monday, March 16, 8/7c, ABC)

You can hardly blame Dancing With the Stars for having to reach deep into the celebrity well after 20 consecutive seasons and 10 years of sequins and body paint. And while there aren’t a lot of recognizable names in this year’s cast, part of the fun of this enduring reality competition is in watching previous unknowns (to many) capture the audience’s fancy—remember Amy Purdy, J.R. Martinez, Helio Castroneves?—while we root on longtime show-biz icons, this year most prominently including pop diva Patti LaBelle and sitcom star-turned-health advocate Suzanne Somers.

The ensemble who’ll be learning its way around the ballroom also includes such reality “stars” as the inevitable recent Bachelor Chris Soules (paired with last season’s pro champ Witney Carson) and Shark Tank‘s Robert Herjavec; ingénues Willow Shields (Primrose in the Hunger Games movies), Charlotte McKinley (from the Carl’s Jr. ads, seriously), and celebrity offspring Rumer Willis; athletes Nastia Liukin, the Olympic gold-medal gymnast, and Michael Sam, the openly gay football player; musically inclined Redfoo (from LMFAO) and Riker Lynch (a former Warbler on Glee); and, perhaps most intriguingly, Noah Galloway, a military veteran who lost an arm and leg on active duty in Iraq and who has become a popular motivational speaker and personal trainer. Inspiring stories like his keep audiences tuning in to see who’ll conquer the dance floor next.