America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is a Netflix documentary series from director Greg Whiteley that follows the team's high-pressure auditions. The series' second season received Emmy nominations in the Outstanding Picture Editing for an Unstructured Reality Program and Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program categories.
In Season 2, hundreds of hours of observational footage help tell the tale of ambition, pressure and perseverance. Editors Stefanie Maridueña, ACE; Noah DeBonis; M. Brennan, ACE; and Zachary Fuhrer faced the challenge of maintaining suspense around an outcome some viewers may already know, while keeping the focus on the individual journeys unfolding along the way. The season also captures the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ fight for fair pay, adding another layer to the stories taking shape on-screen.
Here, the editors break down their approach to character arcs, pacing, vérité storytelling and performance, as well as the editorial choices that shaped the seven-episode season.
America’s Sweethearts has incredibly high stakes despite a lot of the audience already essentially knowing the outcome. How do you have to create suspense in the edit when the ending is predetermined?
Stefanie Maridueña, ACE: “The show's appeal lies in its intimate, behind-the-scenes access to what it’s like to become a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader, and what life looks like after making the team. While some viewers may already know some of the outcomes, our storytelling approach is centered on making every audience member emotionally invested in each woman's journey. By giving viewers meaningful access to their lives, ambitions and challenges, we create a genuine connection between the audience and the women we feature. As that connection deepens, the stakes naturally rise because viewers come to understand not only what's at stake, but why achieving this dream means so much to each individual.
“From an editorial standpoint, that means carefully revealing character, balancing multiple storylines and knowing when to withhold or reveal information so that every milestone in the process carries emotional weight. Even if someone knows the final roster, they don't know how each woman gets there, what she'll have to overcome, how she'll grow or what challenges lie ahead.”
Noah DeBonis: “The suspense doesn’t necessarily come from the final outcome. It comes from understanding what that outcome means to each person. Once the audience knows how much someone has sacrificed, what making the team represents to her, and what she may gain or lose, even a result they think they know can feel incredibly tense. Our goal is to build that emotional investment, and trust that the suspense will naturally follow.”
M. Brennan, ACE: “Like Stef and Noah have said, some of the audience might know the outcome, but not everyone does, and we cut the show so that it’s enjoyable for anyone to join who may not know anything about the DCC and their process. What really matters is the journey to the final ending, what’s underneath the decisions people make, what it took to get to those hard-won moments. In this type of observational filmmaking, nothing is predetermined. Our job is to find the story through lines that will most resonate with viewers and to be true to lives of the women we are following.”
The audience spends only a few hours with these women, while you’ve spent hundreds. Is it challenging to make peace with the version of a person that ultimately reaches viewers?
Stefanie Maridueña, ACE: “I actually think about it a little differently, because our job in the edit is to capture the essence of who these women are as closely as possible, and we strive to create a portrayal that feels truthful. We've earned their trust over the course of documenting their lives, so there's a real responsibility to honor that trust and represent them with honesty and respect. Following the women in the edit can be incredibly intimate too, so the challenge becomes more about narrowing down and clarifying the story arcs when there are so many fascinating layers to each person. But it’s part of the editing process to focus the story, and part of the fun as well! It allows us to experiment with the best ways to deliver the same message with the most emotional impact. At the end, we are always satisfied with how we’ve fleshed out each story arc, and it's incredibly rewarding to watch audiences connect with these women in the same way we did while making the series.”
Noah DeBonis: “That's something I think about a lot. I'm very aware that the audience is meeting our participants through the storytelling choices we make, and that we have a responsibility to try and capture the emotional truth of their experiences as best as possible. I think as a filmmaking team, we are very conscious about not reducing anyone to a single trait or storyline. The goal is never to define someone by a moment, but to choose moments that feel truthful to their experience while preserving as much complexity and nuance as we can.”
M. Brennan, ACE: “This can be a challenge if we’ve maybe had to pull scenes from the edit for time, but overall we take great care to be true to our subjects and their lives. No one is a caricature to us. Personally, I can attest to the fact that we all feel protective of the people who allow themselves to be filmed by our team. We care about them and how they will be portrayed. It’s critically important to us to be honest and true to their experiences.”
Zachary Fuhrer: “To echo what everyone's expressed, we do our best to honor the complete and complex nature of everyone we follow. And we limit the number of subjects because, as our director and EP Greg Whiteley says, we'd rather narrow our scope and go deeper with fewer people than try to follow dozens of individuals over the course of a season. Another thing that's hugely important to this show is that it's present tense, which is a really great creative constraint. There may be a potential subject who faced a unique challenge years prior, but we choose to focus on subjects who are actively working through something that will or won't resolve by the end of the season. And we do our best to establish early on what that thing is they're after, so the audience can connect and empathize from the jump.
“Separately, a friend and brilliant editor named JD Marlow shared with me a concept called ‘the party game,’ which is super helpful for understanding character introductions. The idea is basically to introduce your subjects in a way that makes them memorable and makes you want to spend more time with them, rather than overwhelming a viewer right away with too many details about their personality and life experience. Patience is important, not only for our team in crafting these stories, but also for our viewers, who we're asking to spend seven episodes with the DCC.”
This series often has to balance performance and vulnerability. How do you editorially distinguish between moments of actively performing for the camera and the real, unfiltered emotions?
Noah DeBonis: “I feel incredibly fortunate to work with this team of filmmakers, led by Greg Whiteley and Adam Leibowitz, because the north star of everything we do is observational storytelling. There are no shortcuts to that kind of filmmaking. It requires spending long stretches of time with people and building enough trust that the camera can eventually become less present.
“That time is one of our greatest advantages. When you’ve followed someone through both extraordinary events and ordinary moments, there is often less performance for the camera and more simply being. Often, the most intimate footage is found in those moments, when the awareness of the camera begins to fall away. When I connect with a moment like that in the raw footage, my instinct is usually to avoid overcutting or over-scoring it, let it play as naturally as possible and trust that the audience will connect with the same truth that I did.”
M. Brennan, ACE: “Performance editing is super fun, but fundamentally, we are observational filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman, Albert & David Maysles, with a touch of Michael Apted and his Up series of films. Every performance is rooted in at least one person’s personal story, so we see that performance through their eyes and emotions. How we accomplish that editorially, is by finding and focusing on intimate moments within those big performances or gestures that might not register without knowledge of those personal stories. We often use interview voiceover to take us through a scene, to illuminate backstory. One of our greatest skills as an edit team is instinctively knowing when a subject has dropped their guard and being able to pull that forward, without being exploitative. As Noah said, when we use score, we generally prefer to supplement and underscore those real emotions, not pre-play them for the viewer.”
Zachary Fuhrer: “Performance is a really fun word to think about. One of the things I love most about how Greg, Claire Onderdonk, Zoe Lyrintzis and our DP Jonathan Nicholas shoot is that there's a clear delineation between this kind of dreamy, performative world and the more restrained observational one. We're first and foremost grounded in observational filmmaking, which requires months and months in the field developing relationships with our subjects, and fighting every urge to reverse engineer a storyline or push a subject to present in a way you think might help the story. Our team doesn't take shortcuts, and that's a real privilege for an editor, because every frame you watch feels authentic and considered, and you can sense the trust our subjects have with our producers, directors and crew — these real, empathetic relationships. The DCCs are open with our team because they're comfortable and trust that we'll do our best to accurately reflect their experience, and I think they develop strong bonds with our crew, especially our field crew. In the edit, we want to continue that relationship, while also watching everything with ‘cold eyes and a warm heart,’ as Greg says.
“Back to this idea of performance: our style of show does integrate montage and master interviews alongside vérité, and it's always fun to see what our production team dreams up for the more specialty frames. Interviews themselves are a kind of performance, where the subject's desire to be presentational makes the material so much different from vérité or an on-the-fly interview. We like to honor the interview as performance, and to use it less as a means to an end — a bite here or there to explain an idea — and more like a scene, with enough fat on the edges to stay three-dimensional.
“Lastly, dance performance is a huge element of our show, similar to how we have games in our sports-focused shows. Years ago, I kind of nervously asked an editor named Josh Pearson how he structured the amazing documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, and he said, paraphrasing, ‘I just thought of it like ‘Nina Simone: The Musical.’ I've been running with that comment for years now. I think about how the main events in the show — not just the performances in America's Sweethearts, but the various checkpoints on the way to the final team reveal — are best when they feel like numbers from a musical, where the purpose of a song is often to showcase an inflection point in a character's story while revealing something they can't communicate in dialogue. So, in a way, performances can be really vulnerable, because they show a part of a character's story viewers haven't accessed yet, while giving greater meaning to the event. Yes, there are stakes and drama in sports and competition, but it's a lot richer when that stuff really comes from character.”
Is there an episode that changed considerably between its first assembly and the final cut?
Noah DeBonis: “It’s hard to say whether one episode changed more than another, because every episode evolves significantly. Documentary editing really is a process of discovery, and it’s rare for an early assembly to reflect what the episode eventually becomes. As new storylines emerge and the season begins to take shape, we’re constantly recutting scenes, looking for deeper connections between story threads, shifting emphasis and searching for the strongest emotional throughline. That’s one of the things I love most about this filmmaking team, and about documentary storytelling in general: we’re not simply assembling a story, we’re uncovering it. That said, Episode 1 often changes the most by nature of what it has to accomplish. It needs to tell a compelling story in its own right, while also establishing the world, characters, stakes and themes of the season ahead. As events continue to unfold in the field and our understanding of the larger story changes, the first episode often has to evolve along with it.”
Zachary Fuhrer: “Episodes 1 and 7 are typically the last ones to lock. Episode 7 for Season 2 was down to the wire, because events involving our subjects were still unfolding until the very last shoot day. One of the major focuses of the season is the DCCs' fight for equitable pay, and while it seemed like there wasn't going to be a favorable resolution, we found out during that last shoot that the cheerleaders would receive a substantial pay raise as a result of their efforts. As filmmakers, we couldn't have asked for a more satisfying ending, but more than that, it was just amazing to see that the really freaking brave and risky efforts by the DCCs paid off. Episode 1 changes a lot because the story changes so much over the course of the season. You want to make sure you're introducing subjects and ideas early if you know you'll come back to them later.”
How often do you discover the meaning of a scene through what comes immediately before or after it?
M. Brennan, ACE: “As editors, we are lucky that we actually have a bird’s eye view of all the multiple story lines we are following. Sometimes connections don’t reveal themselves for months. Something small that happens in early auditions, for example, might not return until months later. As editors, we construct seasons and episodes so that viewers will be taken on an emotional journey with our characters. Sometimes that can mean a timeline restructure, but mostly it means focusing on the clearest emotional high and low points that are most meaningful to a particular person’s story.”
Zachary Fuhrer: “We talk a lot about connective tissue, and honestly the hardest thing is maintaining and reconstructing it as episodes change so much from cut to cut. We think a lot about flow as editors, both when stringing together a series of scenes to complete one singular idea and when interrupting that flow to throw to something completely different. If everything moves like one giant wave, you get exhausted and disinterested as a viewer. So, we think a lot about contrast and dynamics, and use a lot of musical terms. I like to break a structure down like a piece of music, defining a phrase, a movement, a symphony. Separately, with the observational scenes, we watch the footage and just try to identify the purest idea that jumps out instinctively. From there it's a lot of chiseling, deciding what you can lose without sacrificing the idea that's core to the scene.”
What conversations do you hope viewers are having after watching this season?
Stefanie Maridueña, ACE: “I hope viewers come away with a deeper appreciation for the women behind the uniform. There's a stigma and a lot of preconceived notions about what it means to be a cheerleader, and our series challenges those assumptions. With the theme around mental health in Season 2, I hope it was a reminder to our audience that behind the image of perfection are real women navigating pressure, self-doubt and incredibly high expectations. I also hope the season sparks conversations around recognizing and valuing women's work. Documenting the team's fight for fair pay was something that really resonated with me, especially as a woman of color. Watching the DCC successfully advocate for the value of their work was incredibly inspiring and a powerful way to end the season. You don’t often get to document meaningful change over the span of a series, so I'm very honored that America’s Sweethearts was able to capture and share that experience with audiences. These women are truly impressive beyond the athleticism and discipline required to be on the team, so I hope it deepens people’s admiration and respect for what they do.”
M. Brennan, ACE: “I hope viewers understand how hard the women of DCC work. They deserve more recognition and support. They bring untold amounts of publicity to the Cowboys and are integral to Cowboys history. There has been a tendency to treat women’s collective experiences as silly or catty or dramatic, when what we’ve learned from the DCC is that they cannot do what they do at their elite level without extreme competence. They cannot be a cohesive unit without mutual support and encouragement.”
Zachary Fuhrer: “Echoing Stef and M, I hope our viewers can really empathize with each and every one of the women we follow. We're not trying to craft a story that tells you what to think, so if our show can encourage conversation or debate, that's really wonderful, it means we've done enough for folks to be invested in the women whose stories we have the privilege to share.”
Looking back over the finished season, is there a scene or sequence that best represents your collective editorial philosophy?
Zachary Fuhrer: “It's hard to look at things on that granular a level, because it's really the totality of our shows that always gets me. My favorite part of watching them is that you can feel the patience, artistry and empathy of our team. You see everyone as an individual and as a group in every frame.
“I also want to acknowledge that we lost a really dear friend and collaborator during Season 2, Jason Arnot. Jason understood how to tell real, honest, hilarious and heartfelt stories, and when you got the opportunity to work with him on a show, he'd always push you to experiment with your most out-there ideas — the caveat being that you had to be passionate about the idea and do your best to deliver on it. That experimental spirit and that ‘yes, and’ vibe, where we're all just pumped to get into the edit every day and support each other's ideas and welcome newness, that's what keeps us all coming back to One Potato Productions. It's a really fun place and a really supportive one, and I think the work speaks to the care we have for the stories we tell and the care we have for each other.”