Stream It Or Skip It?
When we watch new comedy shows, our two main review criteria are whether we laugh out loud and whether the humor comes from the characters instead of just broad gags. It’s a hard balance that takes most sitcoms almost an entire season to figure out. But some get off to stronger starts than others, as a new NBC comedy about junior college cheerleading does.
STUMBLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Courteney Potter (Jenn Lyon) is seen coaching her cheer team. She tells a film crew that she’s put together championship teams, but as a pyramid of cheerleaders tumble to the ground, she tells them, “this is not them.”
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The Gist: Six weeks earlier, we see that Courteney has called in a film crew to document what she hopes is her record-breaking 15th championship season in competitive cheer at Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College (SDSJC) in Texas. But when the dean comes in and shows her a video of her drinking with her team after the last championship and naming the “best booty,” Courteney, in her terms, “agrees to be fired.”
Of course, everyone is sad, including her best flyer/influencer, Krystal (Anissa Borrego), but no one seems more disappointed than her assistant coach, Tammy Istiny (Kristin Chenoweth), who sobs and hugs her mentor even as she starts making plans for what she’ll do as interim coach.
When she tells her husband Boone (Taran Killam) about it, he thinks it’s a chance for her to take a break. He’s the coach of SDSJC’s football team, after a head injury during his college playing days scrambled his brain, and it’s not all the way back. “After I learned to… what’s the word?… talk again,” he starts a sentence off in his introductory interview.
But Courteney wants to win that 15th championship, so she takes a job at a little-known junior college in Heådleston, Oklahoma, the button candy capital of the US. She essentially has to build a team of ten from the ground up in order to be eligible for the nationals in Daytona in about six months, but she needs to build the team for the “show-off’ and camp in six weeks (also, her birthday is that week, which she cares about more than she lets on).
The only member of the team is Madonna (Arianna Davis), who has great moves but randomly collapses into a sleepy pile due to narcolepsy. She recruits Dimarcus (Jarrett Austin Brown) who quits the SDJSJC football team after Boone yells at him about his selfishness; Peaches (Taylor Dunbar), who got her nickname because she wailed a can of peaches at someone’s head; Stevie (Ryan Pinkston), one of Courteney’s best base cheerleaders — 16 years ago; and Sally (Georgie Murphy), who doesn’t have good moves but has such a sad story that Courteney wants her to get a win in life.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Stumble is a cross between the Netflix docuseries Cheer — the real-life cheer coach featured in that series, Monica Aldama, is an executive producer of Stumble — and a mockumentary series like Abbott Elementary.
Our Take: The showrunners of Stumble, Liz and Jeff Astrof, have been in the sitcom business for a long time, writing for both multicamera and single camera comedies, so they know what it takes to draw in viewers. While setting up the story of how Courteney tries to build Heådleston State’s cheer program from nothing, we get a determined performance from Lyon and a reliably funny performance from Killam.
In fact, Killam’s happily lusty (for his wife), brain-damaged lunkhead Boone is the highlight of the first two episodes of Stumble. But the Astrofs and their writing staff give Lyon more than enough elbow room to define Courteney as someone who will go a long way to make her team better — she recruits Krystal from SDSJC by telling her parents (Dascha Polanco, Alfredo Narciso) that the documentary that’s being filmed is about her — but she is also a good coach. She cites her old coach, whose championship record she’s trying to break, as an example of what she doesn’t do, and talks about the old coach making fun of her legs when she was on the team.
But she doesn’t just want to build everyone up, she also has principles, as we see in the second episode when she benches Dimarcus for not being a team player. So we know she’ll make sacrifices in the name of helping her team members learn life lessons.
Anyway, Stumble has a good balance of physical gags — many of which have to do with Tammy’s (and Chenoweth’s) diminutive stature — and character humor. And it definitely tries to emphasize the “found family” aspect of the story, especially given that some of the team members could use some family support (Peaches, for instance, cheers while wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor).
Sex and Skin: None in the first two episodes, except where Boone talks about what happens when Courteney texts him a peach and an eggplant emoji (though he calls the act “none of your business”).
Parting Shot: One of the squad suffers a horrific injury at the end of the “Show-off,” and a pained Courteney says to the camera, “We’re fine.”
Sleeper Star: We mentioned Killam, so we’ll use this space to talk about some of the guest stars that will pop up this season, including Busy Philipps, Annaleigh Ashford and Jeff Hiller.
Most Pilot-y Line: Apparently, Courteney is also the typing instructor at her new school, and her students sit in front of IBM Selectrics like it’s still the mid-1980s. What students would actually volunteer to take that class?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Stumble is not only funny, but it has a surprising amount of heart and character-based humor, and our hope is that it’ll improve on both factors after a strong start.
How To Watch Stumble
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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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