The mirrors are polished, the spray tans are fresh, and ABC is about to put somebody through a nationally televised panic attack on night one. USA Today has the full rundown of the songs and dance styles for the Season 35 premiere of Dancing With the Stars, and the format is rough as ever: two-night premiere, Tuesday and Wednesday, with eliminations built into both shows.

Worth spelling out the format, because it matters. One male celebrity goes home at the end of night one, and one female celebrity goes home at the end of night two. Not two eliminations per night. One guy Tuesday, one woman Wednesday, and the source confirms it splits exactly along those lines.

An elimination on night one is a brutal tradition at this point. You spend weeks in rehearsal, you get one dance, and then Bruno is yelling something operatic at you while you stand there in sequins wondering what happened to your life. It's the reality competition version of getting pulled in the first five minutes of a horror movie.

I haven't itemized the full routine list here, and you should hit that USA Today piece for the actual lineup, because the songs and styles are half the fun of premiere week. But in my experience the premiere spread always does the same job regardless of the specific styles: it separates who rehearsed from who assumed this would be easy. Every season somebody says "I'm not a dancer, but I'm competitive" in the intro package, and every season that person eats hardwood by week three. The song choices are the real tell, though. Give a contestant a track they actually love and their performance energy doubles. Hand them something they've never heard and you can watch the confusion happen in real time.

I've watched a truly upsetting amount of this show over the years, and the premiere is still my favorite episode of any season. Nobody's been coached into a storyline yet. Nobody has a manufactured rivalry. It's just famous people being bad at something in public, which is the purest form of television we have. Give me a soap star counting steps under his breath over a polished freestyle any day of the week.

My read on the voting, and I want to flag it as opinion rather than sourced fact: with eliminations hitting both premiere nights, I'd guess the audience vote carries weight from minute one, which means fanbases are probably already mobilizing. If your favorite has a passionate internet following, they can survive a performance that looks like a fire drill. If your favorite is beloved but passive about it, they might be in danger. That math never changes, or at least it never has in the seasons I've watched.

Watch it live if you can. Same argument I make with The Traitors every year. Half the fun is yelling at your television while the scores come in, and a dance competition experienced alone on a random afternoon is just sad karaoke with judges.

Keep an eye on who gets the contemporary routine on night one, by the way. That's the producers saying "we like this one, let's make them cry in the intro package." It happens every single season and it will happen again. The cha-cha people are on their own.