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Melissa: It's the Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and I'm sending up three cheers for the return of the Netflix docuseries, Cheer. Season two is here and it's going to be tough not to binge this season, as the Navarro Cheer Team hits the mat once more to face extreme physical demands and emotional challenges on the path to the 2021 National Cheer Competition in Daytona.

Speaker 1: We're going to do skills check. We're going to try people in different spots. Friday we'll have mat try out out.

Speaker 2: Some of those last spots are going to be a battle, but your attitude will make or break you, and if the attitude's not good, you won't be going to Daytona.

Melissa: Now, as a former middle school and high school cheerleader myself, I'm familiar with the teamwork, dedication, and athleticism required for this sport. Not that I was ever cheering at this level, but I can't help but hold my breath when I watch one of our favorites or cheerlebrities get thrown 40 feet in the air, or how when a stunt doesn't go according to plan, and someone lands face first on the mat.

But it's the backstories about overcoming personal obstacles and tapping into an almost superhuman drive that suck me in and make me root for this team and it's butt kicking coach, Monica Aldama. For more what to expect in season two of Cheer I spoke with the show's director and executive producer, Greg Whiteley. He started off by telling me why he decided to follow the cheer team on the show.

Greg: We had created a show called Last Chance U and this was about six years ago. The first season of the show was a a relative hit and so we were commissioned to shoot a second season of the show. It was set in Scooba, Mississippi, and we were nervous, like how do we make the second season different than the first season? We noticed that there was a cheer squad on the sideline of every game that we're filming and we didn't know anything about them, so we just made the decision to go attend one of their practices and it was strangely intense.

They were doing stunts and they were doing a routine that we never saw on the sidelines of either football or basketball games. When we asked them about this, they said, "Oh yes, we'd never do these on the sideline of the game because they're just too dangerous and we're saving them for Daytona." Well what's Daytona? As soon as they--

Melissa: What's Daytona? [chuckles]

Greg: I did not know. I really did not know anything about the world of cheer. When they explained what Daytona was, it sounded like a show.

Melissa: Talk to me a little bit about the criticism of the series, that it glorifies extreme physical sacrifice. Young people willing to to go out there with smiles on their faces despite their physical pain.

Greg: I think Monica was criticized. Monica, the coach of the Navarro college team. The first season of the show, she received a lot of criticism for putting kids in danger. There's a historian that we interview in the show who makes the point that why isn't anybody calling out Nick Saban? Monica has won more national championships than Nick Saban has, and yet when there is a football player, a quarterback that goes down with a shoulder injury, or somebody in a national championship game gets an ACL tear in their knee, nobody's blaming the coach and hardly anybody is blaming the sport.

I can't help but wonder why? What's the difference? Why is cheerleading being criticized? It also should be noted too, that there are certain governing bodies in the sport of cheer that have made changes to it in the last 5 or 10 years to make it safer. To try and ensure that coaches and people associated with the sport are trained in the proper way to help mitigate injuries. I think there is something inherent in the sport of cheerleading that calls for its participants to press certain boundaries and do more and more difficult stunts, and it's very difficult to do that without incurring some risk.

I'm all for doing whatever you can to make it safer for its participants, but I have noted that there is a disparity in the way that we treat the risk you assume when you cheerlead versus the risk you assume when you play any other sport.

Melissa: I want to talk about what I think is an even more difficult and certainly legitimate critique and/or concern. Jerry Harris was arrested for child pornography. For those of you all who were working on the show, when this news broke, what impact did it have?

Greg: I think the way that at least I personally processed it, it felt very much like someone who I knew and admired and loved, had died. Personally speaking, I remember really the whole event when the news hit was completely disorienting. I think I spent a month just having a difficult time even admitting that it had happened. I know that there was others around me who work with me who felt similar. When we went to go to back and film a second season, it was an event that was impossible to ignore obviously, not just because of the coverage it had received, but because of the way that it affected the team.

As documentarians, our job is to tell the story of the Navarro cheer team, and that event had such a profound effect on everybody associated with that team. We had to account for it and tell that story. I'm so grateful for the teammates, people who lived with Jerry and knew Jerry well, who graciously and generously sat for hours of questions on our part, to try and get to the bottom of how this could have happened without people knowing it.

Melissa: As I listen to you as a filmmaker, your gratitude and humility in the face of your subjects, the depth of your curiosity about the fundamental question of cheering, but then all of the world that is part of it, your engagement with the history of the sport. I feel like I already know the answer to my final question but I'll I ask it anyway. Why do you think this series is just so compelling?

Greg: Boy, if you think you know the answer to that, I'd love for you to tell me. Here's what I think is at least one reason why people find this show interesting. I think there is something about an individual that is willing to allow themselves to be thrown 40 feet in the air, over and over and over again, and then trust that they're going to be caught by a peer, a teammate, over and over again. In some instances, when that doesn't work out and you land face first on the mat, and assuming you avoid serious injury, how many times I see that individual get right back up and try the same thing over again.

I just think that is a rare human quality. I don't know that I have that. I don't have that fearlessness, that courage or that willingness to endure that kind of physical pain, but I love to watch people who do. There is a strange combination in your prototypical cheerleader of grit and determination and optimism, that I think is compelling.

Melissa: Greg Whiteley. Director and executive producer of Cheer on Netflix. Thank you for articulating what I've known since I was 13. Cheerleaders will save us all, and thank you for joining us today.

Greg: It's so good to be with you, Melissa. Thank you.

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