Season 3 of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders starts a little differently from the first two seasons, because the series has made the squad so popular that they went out on a tour across Texas. But the show soon settles into the same format of the previous two seasons.
Opening Shot: In a darkened theater, we see a woman in a sparkly dance outfit breathe and start her routine.
The Gist: The dancer is Reece, a popular member of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC), especially after Season 2 of America’s Sweethearts streamed on Netflix in 2025. She’s doing the dance routine as part of a Texas-wide DCC theater tour, which senior director Kelli Finglass and choreographer Judy Trammell have planned out due to the popularity of the squad after the first two seasons of the show.
As we see the routines that the squad dances in front of full houses, the members of the 2024-25 squad talk about how now being known individually from the show is a double-edged sword. However, they all generally love that people are fans of individual squad members — especially Reece — as well as the squad as a whole. They also have the time to do a tour like this after getting a 400 percent pay raise before the ’24-25 season.
Another byproduct of the show’s popularity is that the squad has received hundreds of audition videos, from a wider swath of the country (and other countries, as we’ll explain in a bit) than before. As a way to help them sift through these worthy candidates, Finglass and Trammell invite a half a dozen rookie hopefuls to try out live, on stage, during each tour stop, and the audience gets to vote on who they like the best. The selections go on to the final auditions at Cowboys HQ in Frisco, TX.
Just like in previous seasons, both veterans and hopefuls have to audition for a spot on the 2025-26 squad. Among the veterans auditioning are Megan, who led the charge to get the squad more pay, and Kleine, who is outspoken and at times an irritant to Finglass. Among the rookie hopefuls is Dayton, the daughter of Shelly Bramhall, DCC’s associate choreographer; she’s auditioning for the third time. We also hear from Savannah, who has been taking DCC prep classes since she was 16; Faith, an Australian who is double-jointed at the hips and gained an online following as “Flexy Faith”; and Jenna, who made it all the way to the end of last year’s training camp before getting cut.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is a sequel series of sorts to CMT’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team. The show’s director, Greg Whiteley, previously directed the Netflix docuseries Cheer.
Our Take: As with the first two seasons of America’s Sweethearts, we start with the final audition, which leads to traning camp, which leads to the finalized squad cheering at Cowboys games during the season. The wrinkle here is that we spend a large chunk of the first episode showing moments from the DCC’s Texas tour and getting insights from squad members about how the show has upped the squad’s profile as well as gained individual members new fans.
What we wished, though, was to have Whiteley spend more time on both the Texas tour and the idea that these women were now stars in their own right. It seems that Finglass has taken advantage of the squad’s newfound fame, and we would have liked to have seen more scenes where she and Trammell prepped the show and both the exhillaration and pressure the squad members felt being able to do more than just their game-centric routines.
Soon, though, we’re back in Frisco, watching the veterans and rookies prepping for the audtion. The one difference this year is that we get to see international hopefuls like Faith, who talks about the fact that if she makes training camp, her two-day trip to Texas will extend out for weeks. But, because of the larger influx of hopefuls and a large number of returing veterans, training camp is going to be more cutthroat than in previous years.
So that should be fun to watch, as well as the squad’s travails throughout the season. Hopefully, Whiteley will sprinkle some elements of what we saw in the first episode, about individual squad members dealing with their notariety from the series, as the season goes along.
Performance Worth Watching: We hope Faith makes it all the way to the squad for the season, not just because she’s Australian, but because she’s flexible as hell.
Sex And Skin: Besides skimpy dancing outfits, there’s nothing.
Parting Shot: As we see veterans and hopefuls practicing before the final audition, we hear Finglass say, “I don’t want to start the year off threatening the veterans. But with these numbers, I don’t think it is safe to feel safe.”
Sleeper Star: Jenna is an intriguing hopeful because she was literally cut the day after training camp ended, leaving Cowboys HQ right before the rest of the squad celebrated making it for the season.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find, mainly because Whiteley does a good job of giving the show the right tone and keeping the stakes in perspective.
Our Call: STREAM IT. America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders continues to do a good job of showing how much the hopefuls and veterans work and sacrifice to make the DCC squad. We just wish the format was a little different this season.
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.
