America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
Netflix Documentary Series Review – 8th December 2024
KATIA LOM
The Dallas Cowboys American football team is the biggest brand in sport, all sports that is, valued at $1.73 billion[1].
Over seven episodes, America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders dives into the women, both on and off the pitch, who have contributed to this financial success through the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleading squad known as DCC. This is no frivolous pompom shaking. Kelli Finglass (DCC Director) and Judy Trammell (DCC Choreographer), both former DCC members, hold fort working for Charlotte Jones (Chief Brand Officer and Co-Owner of Dallas Cowboys). The trio are a powerhouse on a mission. Seeing and hearing from women instrumental in shaping a billion-dollar enterprise is rare and one of the series’ strengths.
DCC is an elite group. As the opening credits reveal “Each year, hundreds of women compete to become Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Only 36 will make the team.” The work is not taken lightly, and the expectations are high. Excellence and decorum are a must. We are constantly reminded of how DCC represents the Dallas Cowboys as an organisation. Each member is required to undertake a makeover, including hair length and colour changes. Every step, wink, belt strap, eyelash and greeting are carefully managed and choreographed.
As we come to learn in the first episode DCC is a well-oiled machine spanning over half a century. It isn’t its first foray into letting cameras in with the CMT reality series Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team running from 2006 to 2021. This new Netflix venture marks a departure into a prestige-style documentary format and has also proved to be hugely popular. The series premiered in June 2024. Within weeks the show was in the top ten rankings across 27 countries. By November 2024 Netflix confirmed a second instalment.
Directed by Emmy Award winner Greg Whitely coming off the back of Netflix’s recent top hitter Cheer that follows the rivalry between two competitive community college cheerleading teams, the love and respect for cheerleading shines throughout this series as well. In America’s Sweethearts cheerleading is portrayed as a true artform worthy of respect and awe. There is a clear point of view coming from someone who knows the world well and wants to get across the graft, craft, effort, athleticism and sportsmanship it takes behind the smiles and blow-dried hair. Whitely elevates these women to new heights.
Beautifully shot with young scantily clad voluptuous female bodies taking up most of the screen time, it may come as little surprise as to why the series has been so successful, but it would be disingenuous to contend that the show’s popularity is purely down to eye candy titillations.
The first half of the series plays like a traditional ballet documentary with echoes of the infamous À l’école des étoiles (2003) that followed Paris Opera ballet students through their paces in their final year at the Paris Opera Ballet School to see who would make it into the main company, with at its climatic point a teenage boy having a complete inconsolable breakdown when he learns he doesn’t make the cut. First Position (2011) is another reminiscent format of this series that follows six young ballet hopefuls as they compete in the Youth America Grand Prix which stared the late Michaela DePrince who survived the civil war in Sierra Leone as a child.
There is no monumental breakdown in this programme or heart wrenching war testimonies, but we truly feel the hardship and unfulfilled dreams of women who spend years preparing for a role they might never get to fill. The question then comes as to why take on such a proposition for such extreme sacrifices? While in ballet people dance into their thirties and forties, a DCC career is five seasons at most, a management decision after which dancers’ bodies have been so wrecked by the squad’s routines that most are unable to perform again and live with life-long ailments requiring serious hip and other reconstructive surgeries, this being while these women are still in their twenties.
We learn early on that being a DCC is giving to a life of service, requiring a day job to foot the bills, while rehearsals and performances take place on evenings and weekends. Thus America’s Sweethearts brings to the fore the important place that dance holds in our society to this day even within such a highly corporate and capitalist landscape like American football. DCC dancers are ritualised, giving themselves up, body and soul, like the “chosen one” from Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
This is where the series becomes fascinating as it dives into the realms of sociology, anthropology, ritual, religion, faith and tribalism.
One of the attractions of being a DCC is getting the chance to perform a dance conceived by Judy Trammell in the early 1990s after the rock band AC/DC released a song about a road trip through Texas. Thunderstruck, with its R-rated lyrics of a man finding a group of dancers in Texas up for a party and coming multiple times, is an orgasmic release. Add to this thundering tune blasting in a stadium thirty-six gorgeous women skipping in unison onto the pitch wearing nothing but a pair of glittering pompoms, white cowboy boots, mini strap-belt shorts and a star-spangled gilet to cover their modesties is an erotic transcending experience.
Whitely with wonderful skill builds up the anticipation to seeing this dance play out before our eyes as we watch snippets of archive footage and rehearsals ahead of the new squad’s first performance. When we finally get to watch Thunderstruck performed live in full in the opening sequence of Episode 6 it is truly one of the most cathartic experiences to live on screen, an ode to dance that the likes of Balanchine, Béjart, Cunningham and Michael Jackson could have only dreamed of.
We feel the euphoria of a collective experience through movement and music, a shared moment in time. The dance becomes something more than just a bunch of beautiful women moving seductively to eagle-eyed men laden with beer and hotdogs for a pre-game entertainment. Like Shamans the women transform themselves into new identities through costume, hair and make-up to partake in a ritual. As such they give their bodies away. The stadium becomes hollow ground, a space for people to find meaning and fulfilment, a sense of community. This moment transcends into the dancers doing this not for themselves but for the game. The act of the football game becomes a spiritual space, a gathering of souls.
Like Florida-native DCC member hopeful Reece so poignantly shares in the first episode, she sees her talent as being God-given. “I truly realise that what I was given was a gift,” she says, “It is not something that I did. It was something that I was given.” As such, dancing for her is about a religious practice and developing her continuing relationship with Jesus. She views herself as a vessel so that when she dances people see God and not her. Joining DCC is a means to express her faith and where dancing is central to that.
This may raise some eyebrows when looking at the sexualised nature of the DCC shows, yet sex, the body and spiritual awakening forms part of many religious practices, and it is this dichotomy between sex and spirit, corporate sponsorship and artistic awakening that makes the first part of the series so fascinating to watch. It makes us ask questions about the role dance has in our societies, and the rituals that it can take in our lives. We may advance in technology, but there is something so crude and raw about dancing that brings us back to the routes of who we really are, both performing it and watching it.
It was an inspired choice to structure the series away from all seven episodes following the “will they, won’t they” make it format that such documentaries take, and which was the remit for the previous DCC reality series on CMT. Instead here, the climax of who makes the team is revealed at the end of episode 5, and we get to see at last the iconic Thunderstruck performance danced to a roaring filled stadium at the start of episode 6. It’s a brilliant move leaving room for so many avenues to explore in two more episodes.
Unfortunately this is where the series falters and looses itself. After the thunderous “Thunderstruck!” sequence the series never quite regains its momentum. There is suddenly a patchwork of box ticking requirements, from showing how DCC protects its dancers and supports its long-standing staff to how it serves its community through photo-ops. There is the odd suggestion of sexual abuse within the team hinted from the trailer and the warning at the start of every episode with an age rating of 12 because of “sexual violence references,” yet it never comes to that. Instead there is an incident of inappropriate behaviour of a photographer touching one of the dancers in episode 6. It is of course upsetting to witness the effect it has on the dancer affected, but the series never follows the effects of how that act impacted on the dancer longer term.
There also appears to be an editorial fight where the DCC messaging pushes through of “public service”, “doing good”, “being great women for the community”, but with never quite getting there in showing the meaningful changes that the squad does bring locally in Texas.
There was also the missed opportunity to follow Victoria’s journey as a 4-year veteran dancer whose mother had been with DCC in her heyday. Victoria, despite her accomplishment, doesn’t feel she has fulfilled herself artistically or professionally and finds herself torn between what she thinks she should want and what her heart is telling her to follow, and sadly for us, we never quite get to the bottom of it.
There is finally the tantalising wish for the series to have perhaps explored further the connection between sport, dance and religion. Reece had opened a door, and although we briefly follow some of the dancers going to a church service, we never quite get to the heart of the matter.
God and religion are loosing their power, or as America’s Sweethearts hints perhaps they are gaining momentum through the power of dance and football. There is an innate need in all of us to serve something bigger than ourselves, being part of a community. Watching something physically impossible is like touching God. DCC and their wonderful performance of Thunderstruck brought us close to something untouchable.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2024/06/04/the-worlds-most-valuable-sports-team-brands/