Rebel Cheer Squad is a teen thriller TV series created by Holly Phillips and stars Lashay Anderson, Amelia Brooks and Ashling O’Shea, alongside other cast members. The series has 8 episodes, each with a runtime of around 30 minutes.
Netflix describes the series as:
A trio of cheerleaders at a posh private school revive their former classmates’ anti-bullying club and team up to fight injustice in this teen thriller.
– Rebel Cheer Squad Review Does Not Contain Spoilers –
Rebel Cheer Squad starts off on the same themes of the show that it mentions being a part of. 2020’s Get Even was a rather delightful episode, considering that it was a teen thriller. The BBC thriller pays gives small nods to the original series, but the show, unfortunately, doesn’t stick like Get Even. It’s not as fun, flirty and happily & unabashedly teen as its predecessor.
Surprisingly (or maybe not), the series is rather pretentious and walks us through each and everything little information that it brings to the table. Coach’s backstory? Introduced so clunkily in between a random scene that you feel rather awkward at how you found out the information.
Let’s come to the characters – the original series’ characters were quite intriguing because they were from different cliques. They weren’t besties, and that’s why it worked. The four of them, from very different backgrounds and social circles, brought forth stories from these different social circles to understand what was going on in their school.
On the other hand, Rebel Cheer Squad does quite the opposite – it introduces an anonymous forum where people leave hate messages, and one of the trio decides to drop their phone in a bullied girl’s bag. Because being a social justice warrior is more important than giving an already distressed person some well-deserved privacy.
The problem with the series is that it thinks that its three protagonists are really good and righteous, but they are the same generic and boring people who think they can do no wrong because they are after the truth. On the way to said truth, the fact that they break privacy etiquettes and annoy everyone around them. These characters aren’t the likeable bunch from the first movie and feel like a forced extension of the first four with some of their characters.
Also Read: Netflix’s Get Even Review: Murder, Mystery and Characters that Don’t Suck
It also doesn’t help that the characters don’t have any problems in their own lives to deal with other than being very nosy and having a justice boner. You don’t relate to them because they feel like made-up people (which… they are) with little to nothing happening in their lives. They seem bored and fishing for things to do. Of course, bullying is bad, and people should stand up against it. But when you compare the two shows, the DGM came naturally in the first, while in the newest iteration, everything that the girls do seems disingenuous and fake.
Plus, the conversations that these seeming besties engage in are just so asininely bland that you feel bored even with episodes as short as 25 minutes. That’s because nothing they say is of substance or something real people would say. These kids aren’t showcased to from million-dollar families, yet they are able to afford extremely pricey things to play detective. Where they get these things is up for debate – no, you don’t get to know either. It’s just there.
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Rebel Cheer Squad’s attempt to introduce relationships into the mix of this silliness also falls short because these girls, first and foremost, have no personality. You don’t relate with them because the creators didn’t give them anything to work with. Their backstories are as paper-thin as the dialogue that they are all given, delivered in the most clunky and stiff way possible.
Moreover, the one person who has a semblance of a family is Clara, who, along with her father and older sister, seems to be quite dysfunctional, with the older sister telling her sister off for being mindful of her health (which works out just how Clara had said it would) and the father choosing her older daughter to take on an important role without really discussing why or giving others a chance. I am not saying that Leila is the golden child, but you know…
Summing Up: Rebel Cheer Squad
Rebel Cheer Squad seems like a half-baked and forced ‘sequel’ of a show that didn’t need one. Get Even was fun and easy-breezy because it got its story done and dusted fast, and had some versatile and interesting characters. Granted, the original wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was definitely entertaining. The newest iteration is simply forced and unnecessary – milking its predecessor’s name as if it’s a cash cow for the taking.
Rebel Cheer Squad is streaming on Netflix.
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