Dear Gossips,
It was Duana who got me into Cheer, not surprisingly. This is a series that checks all her boxes – student-athlete-entertainers at a small college, a demanding, work-obsessed coach, and a production team that knew exactly how to tell the story. Cheer is Show Your Work all around, we did an episode of our podcast on it, and did you know, Cheer got six Emmy nominations last year and won three of them, including Outstanding Unstructured Reality Series, Outstanding Directing for a Reality Program, and Outstanding Picture Editing? Yes, exactly. Even though the people on camera in Cheer get most if not all the attention, none of that is possible without the skill of the documentarians behind the camera. Cheer dominated the culture in the early weeks of 2020, a lifetime ago, and now, two years later, they’re back for more.
Netflix announced yesterday that season two will premiere on January 12 with nine episodes, three more than the first season – and, yeah, there’s a lot more to say. The series will pick up shortly after the series debuted, when Monica and the students were just becoming celebrities. It will cover the arrest of Jerry Harris on child pornography charges. And it will follow the Navarro College cheer squad through training for the 2021 National College Cheerleading Championship.
But also, Navarro will share the spotlight with Trinity Valley Community College, their main rivals, and the star of that team, Angel Rice, described as “the Simone Biles of cheerleading”. Angel is already a major name in the cheer business, but she’s coming for that big Netflix spotlight:
Much of the spotlight in season one, however, belonged to La’Darius Marshall, the “real breakout star of Cheer”, and if you want a primer or a refresh before season two drops, you should definitely revisit Bobby Finger’s profile of him from April 2020. La’Darius has been through it, he has struggled, and for La’Darius and the students who are returning for season two, it’ll be interesting to watch how it all changes, or doesn’t, now that they’re filming a show that they KNOW so many people are following. Here it is. Get ready to go full out.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey