America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is a series that follows the cheerleaders and their three female bosses.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
Consider the squad’s uniform. The new Netflix docuseries America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (all episodes now streaming) gives you ample time to gaze. The scant blue polyester blouse, really a bikini top with poufy sleeves and a collar, knotted between the breasts for maximum cleavage. The fringed white vest, equally cropped; the star-spangled, belted booty shorts. The cheerleaders say they feel like superheroes when they put it on, but it’s also meticulously designed to look, when they raise their arms or kick their legs, like it’s about to fall off.
The series follows the cheerleaders and their three female bosses – Kelli Finglass, who was on the squad from 1984 to 88, and has been its fearsome director since 1991; Judy Trammell, who cheered from 1981 to 83, and became head choreographer in 1991; and Charlotte Jones Anderson, the Cowboys’ chief brand officer and daughter of franchise owner Jerry Jones – during the 2023-24 season, from auditions through training camp to the games.
In one key moment, Finglass whips out a pair of shorts from a 1980s uniform and triumphantly notes that they were just as tiny then as they are now. Except for minor modifications – adding crystals to the stars; swapping go-go boots for cowboy boots – the outfit hasn’t changed since 1972. And therein lies one of the stealth themes of this series: what has and has not changed for women. And why.
(L to R) Kelli Finglass and Judy Trammell in America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
Some critics argue that America’s Sweethearts’ showrunner, Greg Whiteley – who also created the series Cheer and Last Chance U – goes too easy on the DCC, as they refer to themselves, and I’m sure that to gain access, he had to accommodate the Cowboys’ organization. (According to Forbes, it’s the most valuable NFL franchise, worth US$8-billion; according to a tour guide in the series, the Statue of Liberty could stand upright in its stadium.) But if you watch closely, you’ll see that Whiteley thwarts Cowboy Inc.’s defences as adroitly as Greta Gerwig handled Mattel in Barbie.
Why should he be hard on these young women as they move through their demanding day jobs (including pediatric orthodontist and physiotherapist to special-needs kids), prescribed charity events, elaborate grooming rituals, squirm-inducing injuries, family pressures (most DCC parents spent a fortune on dance classes to get their girls to this point, and two of the moms were DCC themselves) and copious tears, when they are already so hard on themselves? Especially since, if a cheerleader isn’t giving her absolute max for two or three seconds, Finglass and Anderson swoop in to correct her?
What Whiteley subtly directs us to look at is the culture – the Cowboys’, America’s – that enforces the impossible standards to which these women voluntarily, even eagerly, hold themselves: the makeup contouring and facelifts, the false nails and hair extensions that torture their fingers and scalps, the eating disorders and hip displacements (caused by the DCC’s signature move, a jump in the air landing in a full split, which despite the long-term injuries it causes, Trammell won’t nix because the fans just love it so much).
There’s a spectacular moment when four middle-age white guys on a tour of the DCC locker room strike the poses in their favourite cheerleaders’ photos. The contrast between their average lumpiness and the women’s preternatural perfection is both played for a laugh and acutely sobering.
The cheerleaders say they feel like superheroes when they put the uniform on, but it’s also meticulously designed to look, when they raise their arms or kick their legs, like it’s about to fall off.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
Sure, men are guilty of keeping this culture alive, Whiteley shows us: Male fans who pose for photos with the cheerleaders are handed a football, to keep their hands off the women. One cheerleader is assaulted by a game photographer and another finds a stalker’s tracking device on her car, but the police don’t arrest anyone.
Yet Whiteley also shows us that women participate just as avidly. He lets Anderson, dripping with jewellery in her sleek office, go on and on about why the Cowboys pay their cheerleaders poorly. “They don’t come here for the money,” she insists. They come to be part of “a sisterhood,” “something bigger than themselves,” and “to find their passion and purpose.” (The football players, who presumably come for the same reasons, get paid anywhere from US$80,000 to US$50-million a year.)
The most complicit culprit is Finglass, who has an unmovable idea of what a DCC is – basically, what AI would proffer if you asked it for “pretty American girl” – flat stomach, shapely chest and bum but not too va-va-voom, symmetrical face, long bouncy hair, gleaming teeth, biddable attitude. (To every request or critique, the cheerleaders are allowed only one reply: “Yes, ma’am.”)
Studying their features in extreme close-up (not unlike a magnifying mirror), Finglass tells one candidate her eyebrows are too big, orders another to remove the mascara from her lower lashes, demands full makeup and flowing hair even during training, and cuts the image of one from a kick-line photo because “her face is weird” – i.e., she’s showing exertion.
She has a million euphemisms for “not pretty enough” – “Your energy’s too low,” “Your kicks aren’t high enough” – and a clear preference for white Christians. Of the 36 girls who make the squad (even veterans must try out anew each year), five are Black and the rest present as white. If there are any Asians, South Asians, Native Americans or Latinas, they are not featured in the series.
She makes supportive noises when the cheerleader who’s assaulted files charges, but her beat of stillness when she first hears the news tells a different story. She can see that a cheerleader named Victoria is struggling – by trying too hard, she repels everyone – but does nothing to help her.
Whiteley shows us just enough of Finglass’s giddy, jiggly cheering in the 1980s to let us know that today she would not make her own squad. But, in a genius move, he doesn’t make her a pure villain. He shows us her vulnerabilities, too – how she seizes during a phone call with her daughter, rather than display emotion; how she’s obviously a prisoner herself of that magnifying mirror; how she internalized the standards of the Cowboys organization – the standards of good ole’ American male fantasy – because she knows her career depends on it.
When I was starting mine – like Finglass, in the mid-1980s, when “sexy” was as simple as painters’ pants and a centre part – I had female bosses like her. They’d worked like hell and put up with a lot of crap to get where they were in a male-dominated world, and they were conflicted about passing their hard-won gains too easily to the next generation. They didn’t want us to suffer like they did, but they kind of wanted us to suffer something.
America’s Sweethearts demonstrates that the culture of impossible female perfection persists not only because men perpetuate it, but because women do, too. Some things have improved for women since 1972, but much has not. (Back then, to cite a glaring example, abortion rights for U.S. women were about to be enshrined in law; now they’re gone.) By insisting that things – “standards,” “traditions,” even uniforms – stand still, we go backward.
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