Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cheer’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About The Athleticism And Pain It Takes To Be A Top Competitive Cheerleader

If you think high school and college cheerleading is all about supporting the team and going “BE AGGRESSIVE! B! E! AGRESSIVE!”, then the new Netflix docuseries Cheer will try to disabuse you of that notion. Competitive cheerleading is just as intense and athletic as any varsity sport, and it’s only gotten more complex and intense over the past 40 years. Cheer follows one top cheer team as they push towards the national tournament they’ve won multiple times.

CHEER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear a count, then we see a woman being thrown up in the air and caught by four burly men.

The Gist: Cheer is a docuseries directed by Greg Whiteley (Last Chance U) that takes a look at what kind of athleticism — and pain — it takes to be on a top team in the world of competitive cheerleading. Whiteley focuses on the cheer team at Navarro College, a junior college in the small town of Corsicana, Texas. Navarro Cheer has been one of the top teams in the country over the past decade, winning the NCA Nationals in Daytona Beach multiple times.

The documentary follows members of the team, and its hard-driving coach, Monica Aldama, who turned Navarro into a winning program that attracts the best cheer athletes from all over the country. The first episode takes pains to explain that competitive cheer has evolved over the past 50 years, to a point where a casual observer who just sees cheerleaders rooting on a team from the sidelines would not even recognize what the team does on its competitive track.

We’re about sixty-five days away from the Daytona competition, the only one in the collegiate cheerleading world. We see the athleticism of the tumblers and the strength of the stunters, who throw and catch the tumblers. Pyramids aren’t just cheerleaders holding one and then collapsing; it involves throwing tumblers up and down the pyramid, making sure every move is nailed and is perfect.

Cheer is a big business, but not really for the people who cheer. There is no professional cheerleading — Lexi Brumback, who cites Navarro as her only shot at being in college, considers squads that cheer for NFL or NBA teams to be more like dancing — and Aldama has configured her program to help out people who have the talent but lack direction. An example of that is Jerry Harris, who cheered in high school at over 300 pounds, and has lost close to 100 during his time at Navarro. He’s an extreme contrast to his fellow stunters, who pump iron and obsess over the circumference of their biceps.

There is competition within the squad, too, as only half will make it to “mat”, i.e. will perform in Daytona, and as the cheerleaders drill the pyramid over and over, we see many tumblers, especially the girls, fall and get hurt.

Our Take: Usually, we enjoy seeing an inside look at a nichey environment, be it a unique sport or some sort of group of cultural obsessives. We love hearing the lingo, the gossip, and the fact that people put undue stress on themselves to study and achieve in their niche despite the fact that no one outside that niche even knows that world exists. HBO’s Well Groomed is a recent example, where we saw groomers really get into being the best creative groomer in the country. Cheer is supposed to provide such insight, perhaps mixed with the sports doc aesthetic of Hard Knocks.

But, for some reason, we just couldn’t get into the world that Whiteley is opening up for us, mainly because it doesn’t show us anything we don’t already know. Yes, more than one person said that “this isn’t Bring It On,” trying to show that competitive cheerleading is more sport and less rah-rah. But we’ve seen examples of how competitive things can be, the most recent of which was the USA series Dare Me. Think of Cheer as Dare Me (currently airing on USA) without any of the scenes of drinking and having sex. We just see one pyramid after another, and people flipping and twisting midair. It shows just how talented the Navarro team is, but it’s not that interesting.

There are issues that come up that we’re not sure whether they’ll be addressed, due to what seems to be a concentration on the team getting ready for Daytona. Aldama admits that, because they’re a two-year college, the team has to drill harder and longer than students who have four years to perfect their routines; there are full days where all they do is drill. So… when do they study? The only class we see them in is one where the professor talks about why Texas is so awesome. Is there going to be a segment on how academics play into this, considering that these young adults need to be prepared for life after they cheer for the last time?

And, given where Navarro College is, a tiny conservative Texas town best known for its fruitcakes, that barely even know the cheer team exists, how do people from other environments, especially people of color or LGBTQIA+ members of the squad, adapt to being in Corsicana?

There also seems to be a hint of problematic behavior among all the cheer squad when it comes to how they view and treat their bodies. The men are obsessed with being ripped and the girls, who mostly have very little body fat to begin with, are buying scales and watching what they eat. Will Whiteley address this issue? When he interviews elementary- and middle-school cheer fans who are obsessed with a cheer influencer, it’s a bit upsetting to hear, given how hard the people on the Navarro squad push themselves, and how hard Aldama pushes them.

Sex and Skin: Aside from the skin we see poking out of the girls’ outfits, nothing.

Parting Shot: After the injuries during the pyramid drill, the team doctor tells the trainer that Aldama “is gonna love me when I hold out three of her top girls.” The trainer responds, “That’s the pyramid right there.” Aldama looks at the practice with a combination of worry and disgust.

Sleeper Star: La’Darius Marshall has personality to spare, as we see when he dances on the sidelines of a game the squad is cheering for. He also is a talented football player who gave it up to cheer because it was, in his words, “fun”.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing, really.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only if you were a former cheerleader or are interested in the cheerleading world. If you’re neither, Cheer won’t do enough to get you interested in getting into that world.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Cheer On Netflix