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 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 , which hit the streaming service on June 20 and already has the potential to fill the vacuum left by the 2020 sensation (though hopefully with a less disturbing .) With its upbeat soundtrack and near-constant focus on its cheerleaders’ talents, is much more high-spirited and glossy than another cheerleading documentary that came out in 2019, .
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 , 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 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 .
