In Season 2, ‘Cheer’ Confronts Failure Head On
There's a lot of disappointment dealt with in 'Cheer's controversial second season, and the show doesn't shy away from it at all.
Within a week of the first season of Cheer dropping on Netflix, the show had become a sensation.
— Content Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse and child pornography. Also contains spoilers for seasons one and two of Cheer. —
After a few weeks, the hype train showed no signs of slowing down — they were on every chat show you could think of, including Ellen, interviewed in every media publication, endorsed every brand under the sun, and even chatted to Joe Biden. The world seemed to delight in making the Navarro College team flip all over the TV, have Jerry screeching his mat talk on the Oscars red carpet, getting coach Monica to swan all over the stage for Dancing With The Stars.
A second season was not only inevitable, but it was exciting — the world loved these bendy teens and their huge smiles and big hair, and they were keen to see them romp their way into another Daytona victory. Another season of bright and bold good wholesome cheering fun!
The Hype Train
But to be honest, it was kind of weird what success turned the show into — yes the world fell in love with Jerry and his hyper-positivity, and were blown away by the energy and skill of the actual cheerleading, fascinated by the strange world of competitive cheer. But as a docu-series, as a narrative, Cheer was always more serious and melancholy than what the brand endorsement ads afterwards would have you think.
The majority of the kids interviewed came from difficult backgrounds — hard lives, sad homes, traumatic upbringings. The actual act of competitive cheerleading is given a kind of Sisyphean absurdity, a sport which seems to break young bodies and minds, work them until they break down, all for two minutes and 15 seconds of potential glory — and if it was your last year on the team, after that you’re done, forever. The glory of the competitive college cheerleader a brief mayfly, before you’re done.
It was this sadness, as much as the rest of the show, that made Cheer so compelling. It was a show obsessed with winning, and ultimately about a team winning — but it never shied away from looking at the cost it took to get there, the fear of losing, and even the ultimate futility of the entire thing. All that got glossed over in the post-show furore.
Monica Shouldn’t Have Chosen The White Uniform
Cheer Season 2 brings us back into the world post Season 1 frenzy, and it’s all big hype and excitement. We also get the same counter at the top of the screen letting us know that it’s 60 days until Daytona, the competition which the entire thing is all about. We’re introduced to some old favourites, some new team members, and also get introduced to more time with Navarro’s main rivals, the perpetually in-the-shadow Trinity College, who Navarro has just beaten once again.
It’s all enough to make the unaware believe that we’re in for another similar season — which honestly would probably have been very enjoyable, if not a little bit samey as the first season. But it’s also incredibly clear that this is not going to be the case — we know that as the show pushes through 2020, we’re only days away from Cheer having to deal with the imminent arrival of both COVID-19, and the FBI arresting and charging Cheer’s breakout star, Jerry Harris with producing child pornography.
It never shied away from looking at the cost it took to get there, the fear of losing, and even the ultimate futility of the entire thing.
The show does not shy away from the examination of either — in both the episodes ‘Hell Week’ and ‘Jerry’, we get explorations of the horror of both these events. COVID-19 first interrupts the season when both teams are close to perfecting their routines, their bodies and minds at peak performance. Ultimately, it cancels Daytona for that year, effectively rendering their hard work pointless, snatching away the last chance for many of these athletes to ever compete again, their careers over.
‘Jerry’ is even harder to watch, a full hour that not only shows the consequences for Monica and the team caused by Jerry’s arrest — heartbreaking, and heartwrenching — but also features interviews with two of Jerry’s alleged victims, the twin boys who exposed him.
It doesn’t end there — after these episodes, there are several more hard luck occurrences, including the abrupt and confusing meltdown of season 1 star La’Darius, who quits the team and accuses Monica of being abusive.
All this is hard viewing, yet done by the series in a sensitive and compelling way. And quickly you realise the documentary isn’t shying away from exploring every aspect of a very hard emotion — disappointment. Primarily, the audience’s disappointment – the show that they expected to watch, perhaps that they’d been led to watch simply didn’t exist.
We had to experience another show be ruined by COVID, like it’s ruined so many things. The disappointment of being let down by the stars. The horror and sadness of Jerry.
A Show About Losing
By the end of the series, we get to experience Daytona 2021, the pandemic having eased enough to allow the competition. Things are back on track, the hell of the previous year now behind, the recognisable “format” of the show back on track. And Navarro loses. Trinity wins.
We’re given a lot of time with Trinity in this season — a team that has lost to Navarro for so long that it’s become their brand. Likewise, Navarro’s entire brand becomes the winners who have somehow “cracked” the formula of winning. In the first season, with the focus on Navarro, the story is often about what it takes to be a winner, and the pain and sacrifice to get there. The second season instead looks at the fears around not winning — we get to see Trinity living with disappointment, and striving to overcome it. We have Navarro fearing disappointment, and finally experiencing it.
The contrast between Coach Monica – known as “the queen” because of her overwhelming amount of wins at Daytona, who is currently shilling her book on coaching and motivation, and Coach Vontae from Trinity, who lost when he was a cheerleader years ago becomes starker, both working on opposite sides of the same coin when it comes to disappointment.
We get to see Trinity living with disappointment, and striving to overcome it. We have Navarro fearing disappointment, and finally experiencing it.
It all comes back to the fact that success in this world is so arbitrary and fleeting — two minutes and 15 seconds, once a year, with the chance that athletes might have around three attempts in their career, but usually much less. Disappointment isn’t just something to be feared, it’s something to live with, to incorporate into your life, to mitigate, to plot against, for fight to overcome, and often to live with.
If the show was about poptimism, you might look at the end result of Trinity, the underdog coming in after almost a decade and scooping a win. You might look at the Navarro rookies who lost this year, but who will come back next year, and fight to make mat, and then win back the crown. That could be seen as inspirational, and it is.
But also, if Cheer Season 2 was purely about fatalism, we’d focus on the performers who have trained their entire life for this moment, and who didn’t win, and will now never be winners. We might focus on Gillian, who said before the competition that she didn’t want to be “the one” who makes a mistake that ruins it for everyone else, and then goes on to do that very thing. We might look at Monica reading a letter from Jerry in prison, which she describes as “optimistic”. There’s no turning away from the grimness of this season, a harsh descent into reality.
But Cheer Season 2 isn’t exclusively about either of these things — it’s about how disappointment is almost something cyclical, or unavoidable, or ever-present. It redefines winning almost as a reprieve from the feeling. It’s a harsh juxtaposition to the pseudo-psychology language used by the cheer team and the coaches, which always talks about winning as an inevitability, as fate, as a state of mind. Obviously, this is a mind trick, a motivational tool — but by necessity, it means that disappointment is usually treated like something to ignore and diminish, that losing is the worst case.
It was interesting, with this mindset, to watch the show spend so much time trying to understand the big disappointments happening to them — COVID and Jerry’s charges and the negative effects of fame — and come up short. COVID in particular has made disappointment a feeling that we’ve all had to become acquainted with, to make peace with.
Patrick Lenton is a journalist, author, and former editor of Junkee. His new book Sexy Tales of Paleontology is out now. He tweets @patricklenton.