The Agony and Ecstasy of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Show

Over the holiday weekend, I was asked by friends and family what I’d been watching lately and if I had any recommendations. I tend to freeze in these moments, suddenly forgetting everything I’ve seen in the last few weeks—or even years. But this time, I was able to quickly produce an answer. I eagerly told anyone who asked that they should watch America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a Netflix docuseries-cum-branding exercise about a football empire’s sub-empire of famous dancers.My loved ones expressed surprise, as the show—which covers the DCC’s 2023-2024 season—is not exactly in my demographic wheelhouse. But as I argued, it’s not really about football or cheerleading per se. America’s Sweethearts is really a look at something more universal: the vexing and often brutal intersecting of art and commerce, with particular emphasis on the latter.The Cowboys are, in financial terms, the biggest franchise in the NFL—a massive apparatus that uses its cheerleaders as brand ambassadors. These dancers are, in effect, influencers with a single client, albeit ones who have achieved their status through rigorous physical work and are not compensated nearly as well as your average Instagram celebrity.The fact of the cheerleaders’ small salaries—exact figures are hard to come by, but we know that they are awfully low when considering the profits of the company that employs them—is mostly waved away in Sweethearts, addressed briefly before the cameras turn to inspect other matters. Maybe the cheerleaders themselves, at least the ones prominently featured on the show, prefer it that way. To hear them tell it, this job is really about honor and prestige anyway. For many of them it is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Money is not the goal.In some cases, that dream has lasted for generations. Nepotism, one of the buzziest topics in the creative world today, comes awkwardly into play in the series, as Victoria Kalina, the daughter of a former cheerleader, struggles to maintain her position on the team despite the mental and physical ravages of the job. We learn that in a year away from DCC, Victoria flourished. But she was inevitably drawn back in by the lure of legacy, of proving her worth to her demanding bosses—particularly Kelli Finglass, the sharp and steely director of the team. The end of Victoria’s arc on the show is bittersweet—depressing and triumphant at once.We see plenty of heartbreak elsewhere. The first few episodes are devoted to the tryout process, suffered by vets and rookies alike. Matters of technical skill—the dancers must be adept at a variety of styles that are all blended together in DCC’s signature routine, “Thunderstruck”—chafe against the baser, more subjective requirements of the gig. There is much talk about cheerleaders having the right “look.” There is a hyper-focus on weight and a prizing of some ineffable quality that seems largely to mean perky and conventionally pretty and, if the makeup of the team tells us anything, white.The show dives into these body politics, but more glancingly than one might hope. Though Victoria talks about her eating disorders at some length, she does not exactly question the rigid standards of the organization—only her own struggles to reconcile herself with them. Nor do any of the rookies push back against those norms as they try on the team’s signature skimpy uniform for the first time. We are told that once it’s fitted to each dancer, it will not be altered—meaning that a particular weight and shape must be stringently maintained.Which, of course, is also grimly true of other professions in the world of entertainment. So are the horrors of fame hauntingly delineated in Sweethearts by Kelcey Wetterberg, a fifth-year cheerleader doing one last run with the team before she leaves to get married and start a quieter life. (Marriage seems to be the next life phase for many of the women, one that obviates working as a cheerleader for whatever conservative reason.) A few years ago, Kelcey found an AirTag on her car only after she’d driven home, thus realizing that whoever placed it there knew exactly where she lived. She spiraled into justifiable terror and paranoia, and was lifted out of it only by her Christian faith—a deep and abiding one shared by many of her teammates.Sweethearts presents these various difficulties with clarity and some patience, but does not allow them to reshape the show’s angle of attack into anything too critical of the organization. There is a coziness to the show that could only come from careful partnership with Cowboys management—the whole enterprise is obviously compromised. There is much to take issue with there, failures in interrogation and perspective that director/creator Greg Whiteley (who also created Netflix’s once celebrated, now tarnished college cheerleading series Cheer) often covers up with lovely camerawork and plaintive music. I watched every episode rapt nonetheless, and not in a revulsed 90 Day Fiancé kind of way. I was genuinely invested.Because despite the alienation of peering into a microcosm whose values are largely foreign to my own—and despite the obsequious deference paid by one corporation (Netflix) to another (the Dallas Cowboys)—Sweethearts is a stirring depiction of passion pushed to its limits. It’s a mad passion, one that the dancers can sometimes barely articulate beyond generically waxing rhapsodic about the privilege of joining a mighty history. When one starts to find it all silly, one is reminded that most artistic pursuits could be deemed silly from some vantage point or another. What matters on Sweethearts is that this matters so much to them.It’s impossible not to get swept up in the agony and ecstasy of the audition process, the grueling grind of practice sessions. The tears are real; the joy is real; the anxiety is very much real. Stripped of its branding obligations, Sweethearts is a compelling portrait of talented young people devoting themselves wholly to their craft. I may not enjoy the jingoistic aggression of the sport surrounding them, nor the hetero gaze glaring down so hard upon these dancers. But one does grow to love, or at least empathize deeply with, the women trying to assert themselves amidst that storm of money and manliness and manners. It wouldn’t be my dream, but I came to appreciate that it is theirs. Perhaps that’s what America is supposed to be all about.