‘Stumble’ Review: NBC’s Competitive Cheerleading Mockumentary Is Hardly a Winner

Late in the second episode of NBC’s college cheerleading mockumentary, Stumble, elite coach Courteney (Jenn Lyon) addresses her squad. “Now, when I look at this team, I see grit, determination, heart,” she says. “That’s what people are going to want to be here to be part of.”

As pep talks go, it’s boilerplate — nothing you haven’t heard already in a million other underdog sports stories, often in more creative or stirring language. But it feels off in this one, like the setup for a joke you only belatedly realize isn’t a joke at all.

Such is the experience of watching the new series from siblings Liz Astrof (Pivoting) and Jeff Astrof (Shining Vale). The comedy is a tonal mess, veering between underdeveloped jokes and unearned sentiment. But it’s a mess that’s trying so hard, and with such a big smile, that you still kinda hope it’ll find it’s footing someday.

It probably does not help that critics were sent only the first two episodes, and that both are working so hard to establish the (honestly pretty straightforward) premise that they never settle into a comfortable groove.

From the outset, it’s difficult to tell whether we’re meant to be laughing at the characters or laughing with them. It is possible for a sitcom to do both — the likes of Abbott Elementary and Parks & Recreation found great success sending up their milieus and the wacky characters within them while also expressing real affection for them. But it helps to have characters who make a vivid impression right off the bat. Stumble, on the other hand, has characters who are big and broad but not necessarily memorable.

Courteney is our protagonist, an elite coach who’s got 14 championships under her belt and is gunning for her 15th with a top-flight crew from the goofily named Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College. She is in theory a good fit for Lyon, who, as evidenced by her recent appearances in English Teacher, Sirens and Dead Boy Detectives, knows her way around a commanding feminine personality. But the show struggles to calibrate the right mix of pluck and naïveté, determination and delusion, so that in these initial chapters she mainly comes off as confused.

Which, to be fair, she has reason to be. In the opening minutes, Courteney is abruptly fired over a barely scandalous video leak. The news is met with outrage by Krystal (Anissa Borrego), her ditzy but loyal star flyer, and with histrionic despair by her secretly devious assistant coach, named Tammy Istiny. The joke with the latter is that Tammy is, in fact, tiny (she’s played by recurring guest star Kristin Chenoweth) but that her last name is actually pronounced “Iss-tinny,” which, sure.

But Courteney is no quitter — her oft-repeated mantra is “I can I will I must,” exhaled in a single monotonous breath — and so she lands herself a job at the tinier, shabbier, more unpronounceably named Heådltston State Junior College. Theirs is a cheerleading program so nonexistent that until Courteney’s arrival, it has consisted of exactly one woman, Madonna (Arianna Davis), who has exactly one personality trait, narcolepsy.

Courteney’s first order of business is picking up other recruits, none of whom are much more fleshed out than Madonna. DiMarcus is a football player who loves attention and that’s about it, though Jarrett Austin Brown is giving one of the show’s brighter performances. Peaches (Taylor Dunbar) is a low-level criminal with elite-level parkour moves and that’s about it, though her explanation of why she’s called that — “I got the nickname when I bashed this girl in the head with a can of cling peaches, and it stuck. The peaches, and the name.” — is perhaps the most genuinely funny line so far.

Steven (Ryan Pinkston) is a middle-aged man who regrets quitting Courteney’s team 16 years ago, and leaps at the chance to relive his glory days now. Sally (Georgie Murphy) is a mediocre athlete Courtney can’t bear to turn away because she’s always in the middle of some bizarre crisis, like falling into a flavor vat at a candy button factory. The rest of the squad is filled by nameless, wordless entities I assume are stunt performers brought on to make the cheer routines look plausibly good. They fulfill that brief just fine.

This is the random bunch of misfits Courteney will have to transform into a team competitive enough to make it to nationals, and that will surely start to form one big family along the way. It’s a familiar formula, but one that can still work like magic when executed well. Stumble’s best efforts, however, are strained. Instead of a warm, easy time, it 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.

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. At least with those, it’s obvious what the joke is supposed to be. Others bits, like 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.

Stumble is too harmless to hate — it is just, like most of its characters, too sloppy to put much faith in so far. Of course, the usual caveats apply: It is rare for any new broadcast sitcom to come out of the gate fully formed; most need a few episodes or even a few seasons to find their best selves; it is therefore difficult and surely a bit unfair to judge an entire series based on two measly 22-minute chapters.

Presumably these characters will grow more well-rounded as the season continues, and start to form deeper bonds or stronger chemistry. Maybe then, the jokes will get sharper and more specific, the emotions rich enough to warrant the swell of warmth the show seems to want you to feel when Courteney delivers an inspirational speech or DiMarcus starts to set his ego aside. Until then, however, it’s hard to say Stumble looks anything like a winner.