Stumble: NBC Cheerleading Mockumentary

The series follows Courteney Potter (Jenn Lyon), a cheerleading coach who gets fired from Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College after a video leak. She then takes a job at Headltston State Junior College, a smaller school with a struggling cheer program. Her goal is to lead the team to nationals in Daytona Beach.

The show uses the mockumentary format to create humor, with characters breaking the fourth wall and commenting on the story. It also incorporates elements of 'The Bad News Bears', with Courteney assembling a team of misfits. The series contrasts Courteney’s acumen with her husband’s forgetfulness. Boone (Taran Killam) is the football coach at the same school Courteney attends. He introduces himself with a clip of his career-ending head injury as a quarterback—and “Stumble” shows the clip several more times, emphasizing its severity but also the absurdity of playing tactical football at all.

Recurring gags, like one with Madonna suddenly falling asleep mid-sentence, are surprising and therefore funny the first time they’re rolled out, and then less surprising and therefore less funny with each repetition. The action figures owned by Courteney's dim-witted husband Boon ( Taran Killam ) getting blurred out because, the toy company tells the mockumentary, they are “dolls made for children,” simply left me scratching my head.

It's a mockumentary sitcom about college cheerleading.

Jenn Lyon, Taran Killam, and Kristin Chenoweth.

Stumble delivers a string of sweaty jokes that are mostly either too obvious or too random and only rarely actually funny, punctuated by sudden swerves into earnest uplift.

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