Culture recs: America's Sweethearts are back--and they want a raise
Plus: a timely drama about the Mitford Sisters, a wrenching Grenfell documentary, and more...
📺 America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (Season 2 now streaming on Netflix)
Season 1 of this docuseries, from Cheer director Greg Whiteley, follows a group of aspiring Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders through the Darwinian slog that is training camp. Overseeing the program is longtime director Kelli Finglass, a D.C.C. alumna with a withering eye for detail. (If you’ve got too much mascara on your lower lashes, she’ll let you know.) Over several weeks, the recruits endure long, grueling rehearsals while wearing full pageant glam and responding to every criticism, no matter how harsh, with a cheerful “yes ma’am.” Most of the women juggle this with a day job, because even though they represent the most valuable team in professional sports, they don’t get paid a living wage.
Season 2 of America’s Sweethearts further delves into the pay gap, following several of the veteran cheerleaders (most of them women of color) as they push management for a pay increase. It worked: the D.C.C. will receive a roughly 400 percent raise for the 2025 season, although they still don’t have health insurance, something that might come in handy for women living in Texas. Perhaps that’s something we can look forward to in Season 3.
📺 Outrageous (Now streaming on BritBox)
Spanning much of the 1930s, this six-episode series tells the (mostly) true story of the Mitford Sisters, the notorious British aristocrats known for their wildly divergent politics and tragically messy lives. The action is narrated by eldest sibling Nancy (played by Bridgerton star Bessie Carter), a sharp-witted writer who grows increasingly troubled by her younger sisters’ forays into radical politics. It all starts when Diana (Joanna Vanderham), a glamorous socialite married to a Guinness heir, falls in love with Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Then Unity (Shannon Watson) becomes enthralled with Adolf Hitler. At the other end of the spectrum is Jessica (Zoe Brough), an ardent Communist who longs to take up arms against the Fascists. (Sisters Pamela and Deborah, as well as brother Tom, also show up, but are less central to the drama.) Based on Mary Lovell’s The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, Outrageous offers a darkly funny look at the allure of extremism, even — perhaps especially — for those born into privilege.
📺 Grenfell: Uncovered (Now streaming on Netflix)
A few minutes before 1 a.m. on June 14, 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a 24-story block in West London. Thanks to highly flammable cladding that had just been installed to the exterior of the tower, the conflagration spread with alarming speed, quickly engulfing the entire building while many residents followed orders to stay in their apartments. By the time the flames were extinguished 24 hours later, 72 people — most of them low-income and non-white — were dead.
Directed by Olaide Sadiq, this documentary looks at how corporate greed and government negligence fueled an utterly preventable tragedy that exposed the lethal class disparities at the heart of British life. The film features interviews with survivors, first responders, journalists and politicians, including a contrite Theresa May. (The former prime minister admits to more mistakes than any of the multinational corporations involved in the catastrophe.) Eight years after the fire, Grenfell still stands, a ghost on London’s skyline, and potentially dangerous cladding remains on thousands of buildings in the U.K. Grenfell: Uncovered is a difficult but essential watch.
📰 In other news:
Karen Read was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter on Wednesday, bringing an end to a case that captivated true crime aficionados across the country for years. The Massachusetts woman was accused of hitting her boyfriend, a Boston police officer named John O’Keefe, with her S.U.V. after a night of heavy drinking in 2022, then leaving him outside to die during a blizzard. Read’s lawyers argued O’Keefe was killed at a house party hosted by another cop, and that she had been framed by multiple law enforcement agencies. A trial last year ended in a hung jury. The case tapped into deep mistrust of the police and turned Read into a kind of celebrity: each morning as she arrived at court, she was cheered by a throng of supporters dressed in pink. If you’d like to journey down the Karen Read rabbit hole, start by watching the docuseries on Max.
This week, the internet is up in arms about American Love Story, a Ryan Murphy series dramatizing John F. Kennedy Jr.’s romance with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. It started when Murphy’s company released first-look images of actors Paul Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon in character on Instagram. The costumes, especially the cropped jeans and empty Birkin bag worn by Pidgeon, sparked more fashionista fury than the crazy Strawberry Shortcake hat Carrie recently wore in And Just Like That. “These do not appear to be the understated, tailored, and soft-yet-structured Calvin Klein, Prada, and Yohji Yamamoto garments Bessette-Kennedy wore in the ’90s,” said The Cut, which likened the costumes to something you’d buy at (gasp!) Mango or Zara. The outrage grew with the release of paparazzi pictures on set showing Pidgeon-as-Bessette-Kennedy in a stiff-looking leather jacket, satin skirt, and black Chucks. John-John’s nephew, noted pot-stirrer Jack Schlossberg, weighed in on the controversy, saying the show was profiting off his late uncle in “a grotesque way.” The furor grew so heated that Murphy has been doing damage control, calling up Puck and Variety to say that actually, everyone needs to calm down. (Not a direct quote.) We can all resume complaining when the show premieres on FX on Valentine’s Day.
Contrarians, what are you watching, reading, listening to, or just totally obsessed with at the moment?
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
Ryan Murphy could stop digging up dead celebrities and create an original story.