ABC rolled out their cast for season 11 of Dancing With The Stars last night and one of the members of the cast is Jersey Shore’s Mike Sorrentino.

The Situation, amazingly, is one of the show’s biggest stars and figures to add a certain amount of intrigue to the show on a weekly basis. I may even watch because of him.

The problem for Sitch and the Dancing producers is that he’s currently filming the third season of Jersey Shore and won’t be available to start training until two weeks before the Dancing season starts. The other contestants begin rehearsal next Monday in preperation for the Sept. 20 premiere.

The first day Sitch will be able to start training will be on Sept. 20.

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

How does a company keep a mom and pop store feel while expanding?

That is the conundrum Trader Joe’s is currently facing, with the franchise’s popularity skyrocketing but with the example of Starbucks’ over-expainsion looming at the forefront of the company’s mind.

In CNN’s piece called “Inside Trader Joe’s,” Beth Kowitt unmasks the business philosophy behind Trader Joe’s and it’s fascinating even for someone (me) who doesn’t particularly enjoy reading about such sophisticated topics.

The story, which you can read here, dives into how Trader Joe’s serves yuppies and brands itself as an organic-loving independent grocery store, yet has many of its products produced by companies like Pepsico.

Though those types of things are what sticks out to me, CNN’s article isn’t an attack piece. It’s a piece that shows the brilliance behind Trader Joe’s and truly takes you into the world of Trader Joe’s with hundreds of hours of solid reporting.

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

There is a perceived pecking order within Radiohead of which most fans of the band are familiar.

Thom Yorke is the catalyst within the band, the brains and brilliance of the operation and Jonny Greenwood is arguably the most talented and diverse member in the band. Greenwood, the younger brother of bassist Colin, is probably the most vital part of Radiohead’s sound.

Aside from Jonny and Yorke, the talents of the band’s other three musicians are much more under-the-radar. Bassist Colin Greenwood might just be the best bassist in the world right now, but because of the instrument he plays there isn’t the instant ‘Oh my goodness’ quality to his contribution within Radiohead.

Ed O’Brien is the band’s second guitarist and often gets stuck with some of the non-guitar parts and is used in such ways that make a Radiohead song as enjoyable to listen to on the 150th time as the first.

And then you have Phil Selway, who is a talented drummer, but takes a back seat to the other four members of his band. Selway is the unheralded member of Radiohead, in charge of keeping time in order for Greenwood and Yorke to add their unique brilliance to each song. Selway is also the least heard-from member of the band and somebody I’m absolutely fascinated with.

Selway is currently in the process of releasing a new record called Familial in which he brances off from Radiohead in order to work as a solo artist and release a record of songs completely different from what his core fanbase knows him for.

The Radiohead drummer is currently in the process of promoting his solo record and, as a result, recently talked to US Magazine…

US: OK. This record has the same brooding vibe; it’s got the darkness to it but very poetic at the same time. How is it different from the stuff that you’ve done with Radiohead?

PS: I suppose if you’re suggesting musically on the whole, Radiohead operates on a much larger picture, if you like. Musically, there is a lot of space and you have these delicate layers, delicate detailed layers all on top of each other, and in the middle of that I suppose there’s me, which is a different side of me from what’s emerged in Radiohead. It filled something that is identifying me in there, which I don’t think would be a very appropriate thing for me to do in Radiohead.

US: Do you like being front and center as opposed being in the back with the drums?

PS: It’s something I’m learning about, really. It has its fun moments. It certainly sheds a different light on yourself as well. That whole sense of actually moving on and learning more about yourself, yeah. It’s a good process to go through. It’s all part of the same grand plan, isn’t it? From a performance point of view, it’s all stagecraft; it’s just learning a different kind of stagecraft.

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

With an increasing splinter in today’s TV, it’s a good year for the Emmys when they just match what they did the previous year.

Behind that logic, the 2010 Primetime Emmys must feel good that the Jimmy Fallon-hosted show matched 2009’s ratings with 13.5 million people watching small (but breathtaking) cable shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men take home the biggest awards of the night.

One of the biggest things that helped the Emmys’ ratings was the move to August, which meant less serious competition from other programs, specifically regular season Sunday Night Football.

The NY Times has the details…

In the ever-more-fragmented world of television, that’s a victory for NBC. About 13.5 million viewers tuned in, according to the preliminary data, up just 32,000 viewers from last year’s telecast.

Those extra tens of thousands are enough to make Mr. Fallon’s Emmys the “top-scoring Emmy Awards in total viewers in four years,” NBC said, if the preliminary numbers hold, that is. The awards sank to an all-time low of 12.2 million viewers in 2008.

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

Oprah Winfrey will end her talk show next September after 25 years and is planning on going out in a big way.

Winfrey is reportedly already planning a star-studded end to The Oprah Winfrey Show and is also planning on shooting her final show in an open-air football stadium.

At the moment, the stadium that would make the most sense for Winfrey would be Chicago’s Soldier Field. The Bears’ home stadium holds 61,500 people and is just minutes away from Winfrey’s Chicago home and where she shoots her talk show.

How do you like this idea?

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

Billy Joel has signed off on an all Joel-episode of Glee, the legendary singer recently told Access Hollywood.

The announcement came as Hollywood, as many TMZ-type celebrity shows are wont to do now, got to talking about Glee.

Joel was nonchalant about the decision to have an all Joel-episode of the breakout Fox program…

Have you ever seen ‘Glee’?” Shaun asked.

“Yeah,” Billy confirmed.

“Would you sign off on a ‘Glee’ episode of Billy Joel?” she continued.

“I already have,” Billy confirmed, breaking news about the hit FOX show.

“So, have they started the process?” Shaun asked.

“I have no idea. All I know is I said, ‘Yeah! Go ahead. Use my stuff,’” Billy revealed. “I was in a chorus when I was in high school, why not?”

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

Kings of Leon have exploded in the United States over the last two years, primarily because of new tracks “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody”.

As a result, a pretty substantial (and worrisome) portion of the band’s fanbase doesn’t have any sense of their discography.

This presents problems at the current batch of KOL shows when the new fans show up, the band mixes some new unreleased songs with tracks off their first record and the new fans of KOL without the sense of their history are left confused.

“The other night there was someone on the front row and we had played a new song, and then we played ‘Trani’ which is off our first album,” Nathan Followill told Absolute Radio. “I saw the girl look at another girl and say ‘Is this another new song?’. So it’s like a lot of them don’t know the difference.”

Ugh.

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

You’re probably very familiar with the concept, and format, of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

To keep things moving, I won’t go over the old way Millionaire did business, rather we’ll move on and address how things will be different from this point forward for the gameshow.

• Both Meredith Viera and the contestant will stand. There hot seat is no more.
• The questions won’t be asked from easiest to hardest. They will be asked at random.

For the rest of the changes, I’ll just post the excerpt from this website because they don’t work in bullet point form…

The questions will be valued at $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, $7,000, $10,000, $15,000 or $25,000. If all 10 questions in the first round are answered correctly, a contestant could win $68,600. If a contestant decided to stop in the middle of the round, they’ll take home half of what they’d earned up to that point.A second round, should a contestant make it, will be old-school, with questions remaining worth $100,000, $250,000, $500,000 and $1 million.

A new lifeline is “Jump the Question,” which allows a contestant to skip a question and go to the next, forfeiting the dollar amount.

“Contestants will have to apply more strategy to see which risks they’re willing to take,” Vieira says.  ” ‘Millionaire’ will look a lot different this year, but the foundation of the show remains intact.”

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

Vince Gilligan is the creator of Breaking Bad, which you’ve either never seen or watch religiously. I don’t believe there is any in between.

In preparation for next Sunday’s Emmys, Deadline.com conducted a quality interview with Gilligan as the award show approached and AMC announced Breaking Bad received a fourth season. You can read the entire interview here, but for now, here is an excerpt…

DH: Is it at all daunting to have created a show that you now have to continually live up to?

VG: The answer is yes. But as my agent likes to say, it’s a high class problem to have – but a problem nonetheless. There’s always that neurotic fear of failing in my mind, and it really kicked me into overdrive last year after we got that first Emmy nomination for best drama series. It was tough in that writers room. Suddenly everything was second guessed, triple guessed, quadruple guessed. It affected me more than it did the writers. That’s why I’m thankful for the invention of bourbon. It helps. A little. That, and sleep. All we can do is put our heads down and keep doing good work. And we’re so ambitious. We’re trying to do stuff no one has ever seen before, which always costs money. But we’ve got a pretty good deal already in New Mexico with a 24% rebate. And besides that, it’s a great place to shoot.

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.

When Kanye West and Justin Bieber were talking about getting together and collaborating on a track via Twitter and it seemed like something that just didn’t make sense.

Well, the Beiber-Kanye is happening, according to Raekwon, and the Wu-Tang member is going to be a part of the groundbreaking collaboration.

Raekwon recently talked about the collaboration to XXL Magazine…

“It’s definitely going to happen. I’m big fans of both of these guys. I think, at the end of the day, shorty [Bieber] is a sensation. And [for him] to acknowledge me it makes me feel good that the young generation is checking me out like that.”

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“Yeezy [West] called me and we going to make it pop. We’re all doing our thing in the game and for them to even just have a conversation and just put my name in it feels good. And we’re going to make a hit.”

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.