Cheer

We’d say it’s interesting.
  • 25 Jan - 31 Jan, 2020
  • Mag The Weekly
  • TV TIME

Cheer, Netflix’s documentary series about cheerleading champions from Navarro College in Texas is like being in the marines. Seeing the dedication, resilience and innate talent of the athletes, many of whom come from profoundly troubled backgrounds and have seized upon the sport and the specialised college course as an almost literal lifeline, will break you down. The members of the Navarro squad are competitive cheerleaders and its practitioners are somewhere between acrobats, dancers and weightlifters, while maintaining the stamina of long-distance runners. The series focuses, refreshingly, on the graft, not the glamour – which comes for a few fleeting minutes at the end of a year’s training when state teams converge on the national championship in Daytona to compress all their work into one routine. And although it registers friendships and fallings-out, it does not make them into soapy storylines. It prefers, equally refreshingly, to dig deep into the many qualities that must combine to make a single performer, and then how they must coalesce into one team. Each episode fills in, without sensationalism or sentimentality, the back stories of various squad members. In that way, Cheer balances the way that these fliers and bases can find fulfillment through committing to a unit like this while realising how these institutions can treat them as assets. But as setbacks happen and members of the team are swapped in and out for various reasons it makes sure to follow the trajectories of the people at the center of the show’s story.

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