Fifty-three seconds into the first episode of Netflix’s docuseries Cheer, teenaged Morgan talks about pain. Fifty-four seconds into Cheer, she’s thrown into the air, twisting and flipping like a fish on a line. She comes careening back down into three sets of arms one second later, and she lands with a thunderclap of brutality, muscle smacking against muscle.
“Are you okay, Morgan?” someone asks. My untrained eye can’t pick up what’s wrong — just that something is wrong. And though Morgan walks off the rough landing, her body, gingerly stiff and wobbling unevenly, is what I think it looks like to silently scream.
After watching Cheer’s first 55 seconds, I knew I was going to spend the next six hours of my life breathing, consuming, Googling, and social media-stalking everything about the show. I knew then that it was my favorite new show of this very young year.
Cheer focuses on a competitive sport that fuses turgid, erotic tribalism with the body-breaking violence of muscular humans flinging tinier, lighter humans into the air and then catching them — callused hands atop thickly taped wrists, clawing into triceps and ankles. To that mixture, the show adds the us-against-the-world mentality of Charles Xavier’s X-Men and the small-town glamour of Friday Night Lights.
This is competitive junior college cheerleading at the dynastic Navarro College. This is Cheer. And this show is ballistically addictive.
Cheer takes place in the mecca of junior college competitive cheerleading, a place called Navarro College, Navarro for short. It’s in a town 60 miles south of Dallas called Corsicana, and absolutely nothing competes with the Navarro cheerleaders. They are the biggest and only thing in town, having won 14 National Cheerleaders Association National Championships and five “grand national” wins, which basically means they got the highest score at the national championships regardless of division and designation.
But while the Navarro Bulldogs dominate on the mat, they’re still underdogs.
Director Greg Whiteley (of Netflix’s college football docuseries Last Chance U) doesn’t shy away from showing the grim reality of many of these cheerleaders’ futures. Not many have options beyond cheering at this National Championship-caliber school, many stating that the team is the only thing that’s keeping them from getting into trouble or making bad decisions. The one kid who has seemingly solid post-cheer prospects, an Instagram “cheerlebrity” with nearly a million followers, is blatantly being used by her parents as a cash cow.
Even then, the escape Navarro cheer offers these young women and men is temporary, as cheerleading is something that ends after college. Professional cheerleading is more like dancing, and those gigs aren’t usually fairly paid. This makes the years spent at Navarro so important for the kids there, especially the ones who would otherwise be at risk and out of school.
In the crosshairs of Cheer’s urgency, desperation, and drama are the National Championships in Daytona Beach, Florida. Specifically, the national championship performance, the two minutes and 15 seconds that’s relegated to an intricate and difficult routine where anything, even moves drilled into muscle memory by thousands of repetitions, could go wrong. And it’s coach Monica Aldama’s job to create a team that won’t break in those 135 seconds, as she’s done 14 times in her life.
by Alex Abad-Santos, Vox | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. Highly recommended (I'm in love with Monica). See also: How Cheer’s Superstar Coach Monica Gets It Done (The Cut).]
“Are you okay, Morgan?” someone asks. My untrained eye can’t pick up what’s wrong — just that something is wrong. And though Morgan walks off the rough landing, her body, gingerly stiff and wobbling unevenly, is what I think it looks like to silently scream.
After watching Cheer’s first 55 seconds, I knew I was going to spend the next six hours of my life breathing, consuming, Googling, and social media-stalking everything about the show. I knew then that it was my favorite new show of this very young year.
Cheer focuses on a competitive sport that fuses turgid, erotic tribalism with the body-breaking violence of muscular humans flinging tinier, lighter humans into the air and then catching them — callused hands atop thickly taped wrists, clawing into triceps and ankles. To that mixture, the show adds the us-against-the-world mentality of Charles Xavier’s X-Men and the small-town glamour of Friday Night Lights.This is competitive junior college cheerleading at the dynastic Navarro College. This is Cheer. And this show is ballistically addictive.
Cheer takes place in the mecca of junior college competitive cheerleading, a place called Navarro College, Navarro for short. It’s in a town 60 miles south of Dallas called Corsicana, and absolutely nothing competes with the Navarro cheerleaders. They are the biggest and only thing in town, having won 14 National Cheerleaders Association National Championships and five “grand national” wins, which basically means they got the highest score at the national championships regardless of division and designation.
But while the Navarro Bulldogs dominate on the mat, they’re still underdogs.
Director Greg Whiteley (of Netflix’s college football docuseries Last Chance U) doesn’t shy away from showing the grim reality of many of these cheerleaders’ futures. Not many have options beyond cheering at this National Championship-caliber school, many stating that the team is the only thing that’s keeping them from getting into trouble or making bad decisions. The one kid who has seemingly solid post-cheer prospects, an Instagram “cheerlebrity” with nearly a million followers, is blatantly being used by her parents as a cash cow.
Even then, the escape Navarro cheer offers these young women and men is temporary, as cheerleading is something that ends after college. Professional cheerleading is more like dancing, and those gigs aren’t usually fairly paid. This makes the years spent at Navarro so important for the kids there, especially the ones who would otherwise be at risk and out of school.
In the crosshairs of Cheer’s urgency, desperation, and drama are the National Championships in Daytona Beach, Florida. Specifically, the national championship performance, the two minutes and 15 seconds that’s relegated to an intricate and difficult routine where anything, even moves drilled into muscle memory by thousands of repetitions, could go wrong. And it’s coach Monica Aldama’s job to create a team that won’t break in those 135 seconds, as she’s done 14 times in her life.
by Alex Abad-Santos, Vox | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. Highly recommended (I'm in love with Monica). See also: How Cheer’s Superstar Coach Monica Gets It Done (The Cut).]
