Not a Book: America’s Sweethearts

Back to the streaming services this Sunday and a documentary that I actually watched basically as soon as it came out – but which has taken a few weeks to actually get posted because of things that were slightly more pressing on a time front. But actually it’s been really interesting to watch the conversations about this series over the last few weeks as well.

America’s Sweethearts is a seven part documentary series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It follows them across the course of one season – with auditions to join the team, the training camp that follows and then the actual football season. It picks out a couple of the women in particular to highlight – Victoria and to a lesser degree Madeleine, veterans whose mothers were also on the squad; Caroline, newly retired and trying to adjust to the post-DCC world and her sister Anna-Kate who is auditioning for the team herself this year; Kelcey, a senior veteran on the team in her final season and Reese, a rookie candidate looking to make the team for the first time. Using those women it explores the impact of being on the team – physically and mentally, the sisterhood of the women who have been a part of it, and the squad’s place in the multi-billion dollar brand that is the Dallas Cowboys.

This is not the first series about the team – there were previously 14 seasons of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team produced by the CMT channel. Both series were authorised by the organisation itself, the people running the team are the same – DCC director Kelli Finglass, chief choreographer Judy Trammell – both former DCC themselves – and their boss Charlotte Jones Anderson, daughter of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Even some of the cheerleaders on the squad are the same – the CMT show finished with the 2021 season and some of those women were still cheering last seaons – but the actual shows are very different.

Making the Team was very much a reality tv series in many ways – each season followed a similar structure: you started with the preliminary auditions and semi finals, it moved on to finals weekend where the re-auditioning veterans join the new hopefuls, then you move to training camp where across the next episodes the girls will learn the “signature dance” complete with kickline ending in the infamous jump splits, get make overs, be fitted for their uniforms, have their publicity photos taken and watch the rookie hopefuls get cut one by one to make a team of around 36. Some years you’ll also get to see auditions for the team’s show group – who get to do extra dance performances beyond the football games – or watch the veterans trip to a holiday resort to shoot the squad’s swimsuit calendar. The main focus of the show is on the fresh rookies – some will be completely new, others might be returners who were cut in previous years – and get a few glimpses of the cheerleaders you’ve followed in recent seasons.

And as you’ve probably guessed by comparing my descriptions of the two shows, they are quite different beasts. And not just because Netflix has paid for the music rights so you can finally be told that the “Signature dance” is actually known as Thunderstruck – because that’s the song that it is danced to*. The team behind America’s Sweethearts are using the structure of the season as a way of examining the idea of the squad as a whole.

And the appeal of the series goes way beyond the viewers of the old CMT series (something which the series’s subreddit is yet to come to terms with). What do I mean by that? well Him Indoors hated MTT with a burning passion – my sister and I watched it when he was out of the room – but he said he wanted to take a look at this series and see what it was like – and ended up watching the whole thing. A colleague at work who is a sports and documentary fan but not someone I would have expected to have watched it, had already watched it when I went to recommend it to him and described it as the best documentary series he’s watched this year.

And there are a lot of different things it is possible to take from watching it – hence why it’s spawed a thousand think pieces for you to read on the subject. There’s Vanity Fair’s The Agony and Ecstasy of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Show, Vox’s The ugly process of turning beautiful women into Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, The Guardian’s Do you struggle to accept rejection? We could all learn a lot from American Cheerleaders, USA Today’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Netflix show is addictive. Here’s why, The Globe and Mail’s The secret feminism of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and BBC News’s more simple America’s Sweethearts: Life after Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. And that’s just a small selection.

I could write paragraphs more about the show – but this post is already massively long, so I’m going to wrap it up here and hope that this is enough to get you to take a look at the series, no matter what your views on cheerleaders or American sport!

Have a great Sunday everyone.

*and for long-time viewers of MTT who (like me) have never made it to a Cowboys game, this does have a pretty much complete performance of Thunderstruck for you to enjoy and see how it all the various parts fit together. And yes, Kelli does also explain her Yes, No, Maybe scoring system for auditions. You’re welcome.