Not every story is a knife fight. The emotional core belongs to Milan, a plus-size (by DCC standards, meaning a size 4) former NBA dancer with a radiant smile. Her struggle isn’t weight—it’s memory retention. Watching her cry in her car after flubbing a routine, then return the next day with index cards taped to her steering wheel, is more inspiring than any “final performance” montage. And then there’s Brennan, a mother of two who made the team a decade prior but left to raise kids. Her comeback attempt is fraught with ageism (unspoken) and stamina issues (very spoken). When she finally nails the notoriously hard “Thunderstruck” routine, Judy’s rare smile is worth the entire season.
★★★★☆ (Four out of five hair ties—minus one for the unnecessary tanning bed segments.) dallas cowboys cheerleaders: making the team season 12
Let’s address the elephant in the locker room. Season 12 still includes the notorious “weigh-ins” and uniform fittings, where Kelli pokes, prods, and verbally notes “extra fabric” around a candidate’s midsection. Watching it in 2024 is jarring. There’s a voyeuristic discomfort to seeing a 22-year-old told she needs to lose “three to five pounds” for the blue sequins to hang correctly. Yet the show never frames this as cruelty—it’s presented as a practical reality of the job. That cognitive dissonance is the show’s secret weapon. You’re forced to ask yourself: Am I watching empowerment or exploitation? Season 12 refuses to answer, which is why it lingers. Not every story is a knife fight
By Season 12, the CMT reality staple has long abandoned any pretense of being a simple competition show. We know the format: 40+ hopefuls enter “Training Camp,” a brutal, month-long audition process run by the iron-willed trio of Director Kelli Finglass, choreographer Judy Trammell, and the late, great “eye of the tiger” himself, Charlotte Jones Anderson. The goal isn’t just to make a dance team. It’s to mold a brand ambassador. Watching her cry in her car after flubbing
Season 12 is peak Making the Team because it stops pretending to be about dance. It’s a show about —not just of choreography, but of femininity, resilience, and deference. The DCC are expected to be approachable yet untouchable, athletic yet delicate, teammates yet rivals. The women who survive learn to cry in private, smile in public, and treat every “correction” as a gift.
Then there’s Kalyssa, the rookie with a killer body and an even bigger Instagram following. She’s technically brilliant but perpetually smiling through corrections like a hostage in a toothpaste ad. Judy Trammell, the quiet assassin of the panel, mutters the season’s most damning critique: “She’s dancing for herself, not for the seat next to her.” Season 12 understands something most dance shows don’t: uniformity isn’t about erasing personality, but about synchronizing vulnerability . Kalyssa’s eventual cut is a brutal lesson in humility—her solo skills mean nothing if she can’t make the woman to her left look equally good.