If you’re one of the fans who can recite the entire cheeky opening cheer from the 2000 teen cult classic flick ‘Bring It On’ (“I’m sexy, I’m cute! I’m popular to boot! I’m bitchin’. Great hair! The boys all love to stare! I’m wanted, I’m hot! I’m everything you’re not…”), you deserve a spirit stick. Or, say, a new cheer-themed comedy — like the NBC mockumentary “Stumble.”
A cockeyed look at the high-kicking, high-flying world of competitive college cheerleading — and all the bone-crushing injuries and soul-crushing setbacks that come with it — “Stumble” centers on celebrated cheerleading coach Courteney Potter (a delightfully deadpan Jenn Lyon of “Claws,” TNT’s nail salon-set crime drama), who’s unceremoniously fired from her position at Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College in Wichita Flats, Texas, thanks to a viral victory-party video involving alcohol, the squad and her conferral of a “Best Booty” award.
Fortunately, she bounces back with a coaching job at a junior college in the fictional town of Heådltston, Oklahoma; unfortunately, they don’t have a cheer team and no one can pronounce the name of the town, whose claim to fame is its candy-button factory. Only the first two eps were made available for review, but something to look forward to: The fabulously funny Jeff Hiller, a newly minted Emmy winner for “Somebody Somewhere,” will guest-star as factory owner Augustus. How Willy Wonka!
Undeterred, Courteney starts searching high and low — mostly low — for her next group of would-be champs. Among the motley crew she assembles: Peaches (Taylor Dunbar), an ankle bracelet-wearing acrobat/petty thief; a narcoleptic tumbler — in a running joke of questionable taste, she simply drops to the floor in a dead sleep at random moments — named Madonna (Arianna Davis); Dimarcus (Jarrett Austin Brown), an egotistic, backflipping ex-football player that Courteney spots while chatting on the sidelines with her coach hubby played by “SNL” alum Taran Killam, relishing his role as the head-injured man-behind-the-woman at an SDSJC practice; the lovable and slightly pathetic Sally (Georgie Murphy), whose foster parents just gave her the boot; rental-car-agency management trainee Stevie (Ryan Pinkston), who cheered for Courteney 16 years ago but retained his eligibility since he never graduated.
She even manages to poach her “star flyer” Krystal (Anissa Borrego) — a legit cheer-lebrity — from SDSJC and her scrunchie-wearing former assistant coach, Tammy Istiny (Broadway star and comic dynamo Kristin Chenoweth). Fun fact: Chenoweth was a cheerleader at her high school in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and that is an actual life-size cardboard cutout of the actress in her Tigers uniform at the end of Episode 2.
A tough-as-nails Texas juco cheer coach with more than a dozen championships under her belt — sounds familiar, right? It should, if you watched the Emmy-winning Netflix docuseries “Cheer,” the pandemic-era sensation that followed the highly acclaimed Navarro College cheerleaders of Corsicana, Texas, and their uncompromising coach Monica Aldama. Sharp-eyed “Stumble” viewers will see Courteney is clearly inspired by Monica, from the Texas twang to the skinny jeans to the black knee-high boots to the French manicure. She even makes a cameo in the first episode to boot.
And oh yes, Aldama is an executive producer on “Stumble,” which should guarantee a certain amount of authenticity. “Stumble” did recently post a casting notice — “looking for men and women with competitive college cheerleading experience” — on the website Cheer Daily. The show might be mocking the characters, but that doesn’t mean it can’t take the sport seriously.
“Stumble” premieres Friday Nov. 7 at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.
