It’s all too easy to dismiss cheer as a male-fantasy-oriented thorn in the side of the feminist movement, but if you’ve ever actually seen a high-level cheer practice take place (or even just watched Bring It On on a hungover Sunday), you hopefully already know the danger of underestimating cheerleaders. The intense amount of preparation and physical sacrifice that professional-level cheer squads submit to in order to captivate their audiences is front and center in Netflix’s new docu-series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, which hit the streaming service on June 20 and already has the potential to fill the vacuum left by the 2020 sensation Cheer (though hopefully with a less disturbing behind-the-scenes story.)
With its upbeat soundtrack and near-constant focus on its cheerleaders’ talents, America's Sweethearts is much more high-spirited and glossy than another cheerleading documentary that came out in 2019, A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem. Yet the systemic issues plaguing the sport that surfaced in that doc can’t help but haunt this one, too. NFL cheerleaders have filed a number of lawsuits in recent years alleging everything from wage theft to sexual harassment, and it’s difficult to enjoy the pageantry of young women competing to be the best (or, at least, fit into NFL cheerleading’s narrow vision of what “the best” is) without worrying about what kind of labor abuses await them if they actually make the team.
One scene in America’s Sweethearts finds a fifth-year veteran candidate named Kelcey meal-prepping chicken and potatoes for her busy week ahead—a routine that seems pretty familiar and normal until we learn that Kelcey is a nurse who works from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day, then reports to what she calls her “part-time job” with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders until midnight. “A lot of us work full-time jobs and then come to DCC at night,” Kelcey explains. Yet Kat, another veteran, doesn’t share Kelsey’s calm, telling the camera that she’s being paid on the level of “a substitute teacher…or a Chick-fil-A worker that works full-time.” (Both professions that deserve better pay, by the way!)
“These millennials, X-Gen, whatever they’re called, they look at it as a job, where us old-timers look at it as more of a privilege,” notes former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Tina Kalina, whose daughter Victoria is a current squad member. Indeed, that generational shift captures so much of what feels strange about America’s Sweethearts, and the world of professional cheerleading in general. The doc and the sport are caught between a wholehearted embrace of the past and the rumble of revolution, and it’s hard not to want more for the cheerleaders onscreen than constant, harsh-but-loving evaluation and a depressingly meager paycheck.
There are sweet moments to be found in America’s Sweethearts (the members of the squad are like sisters, and at one point we see Kalina using a Theragun to ease Victoria’s sore muscles), but they’re largely overshadowed by what these young women are forced to go through in order to achieve their cheer dreams. Victoria, in particular, stands out for her willingness to discuss her ongoing battle with disordered eating, something that seems to be exacerbated by the physical and emotional pressures of her job. “She’s a makeover needing to happen,” murmurs longtime Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders director Kelli Finglass as one girl exits after her tryout; and later in the show’s first episode, a male judge muses about another candidate’s face looking puffy. What Finglass obliquely calls “the aesthetic part of this job” still obviously has the power to eclipse a candidate’s athletic skill or artistry, and while that imbalance might be an accepted part of professional-level cheerleading, it’s difficult to stomach as a viewer. (Especially one like me, who could get emotionally attached to a potted plant, let alone a sea of earnest, emotionally vulnerable young women.)
If there’s one thing America’s Sweethearts makes clear, it’s that it’s not only a potentially dismissive viewing public that needs to up its respect for cheerleaders, but also the sports world that has been under-compensating and otherwise exploiting their work (and yes, it is work) for far too long. The priviledge of the position is not payment enough. In other words: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders union, when?
