‘I Am Pleasing to Everyone’

Netflix is out with a new delectable documentary series,, about tryouts for the 2023 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Why should I, someone who’s never reviewed anything other than a book, be the one to review it? For starters, a sick day granted me the ability to guzzle it down in a single seven-hour stretch. The show scratched just about every itch that I have: As a former cheerleader who spent much of this year in physical therapy to address a chronic back injury, I find watching people hit moves with a precision that I can no longer even approximate to be deeply satisfying. I also love a documentary that examines American culture without saying it’s doing that—even better if it doesn’t seem to it’s doing that. is a show about the cult of femininity, of which I consider myself—depending on the day—a subject or a survivor. Plus, growing up in rural California in the 1990s, at the height of NFL monoculture, I