“America’s Sweethearts charts the surprisingly intense world of professional cheerleading, following dozens of women who dream of performing for the Dallas Cowboys elite squad,” writes streaming columnist NICK OVERALL.

OUT on Netflix this month is a sports doco that’s managed to stay in the top 10 most watched shows for several weeks now.

This new seven-part series follows a group of hyper-competitive athletes vying for the chance to perform on the ultimate national stage.

Basketball? Soccer? Cricket? No. They’ve all been done. This one is about cheerleading.

America’s Sweethearts charts the surprisingly intense world of professional cheerleading, following dozens of women who dream of performing for the Dallas Cowboys elite squad.

Only 36 can make it, though. The documentary charts the process to get in, from cutthroat video auditions to a gruelling training camp.

When it’s this competitive the tiniest details can make or break a tryout, from falling a few centimetres short of the required height of a leg kick to having smudged make-up, the selectors are brutal in their nitpicking. I’m surprised some of these judges were bold enough to outline their selection criteria on camera. Seems fraught with danger in this era.

What’s even more extraordinary is that a lot of these women hold down full-time jobs while going through this training process because of how little they are paid.

On average, NFL cheerleaders make only around $150 a game, a ludicrously small amount given the dozens of hours that go into training each week. Seems pretty cheap for a franchise worth more than $US150 billion.

One of the women in the doco even works as a nurse when the pom poms are down. How you keep that routine up I don’t know.

As someone with only a passing interest in the NFL, let alone cheerleading, I was surprised how quickly this doco actually drew me in.

America’s Sweethearts is peak guilty-pleasure viewing. A little trashy sure, but those who enjoy sports docos will likely find the pursuit of athletic prowess here an entertaining watch in its own way.

NOW streaming on Paramount Plus is a homegrown contender for this year’s best drama series.

It’s called Fake and it follows Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie), a food writer who begins to unravel the mystery surrounding a man she meets through an online dating app.

At first he seems like the one, a successful grazier with all the looks and charm in the world, but it’s not long before she finds out he harbours some unnerving secrets indeed.

It’s like the fear of a Tinder date gone wrong dialed up to 10.

Aussie star David Wenham is the one who plays this creepy Casanova named Joe Burt.

The Aussie-made series includes eight episodes around 40 minutes a piece and was filmed entirely in Melbourne.

Eerie and addictive, Fake is absolutely the real deal.

IT’S been almost 30 years since Twister hit cinema screens, a blockbuster flick that wasn’t really all that good but has still managed to cement its place in the disaster-movie canon.

It stars Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt as two meteorologists determined to create a weather warning system by putting themselves in the path of tornadoes.

As is the case with any remotely popular film, Twister is now getting a sequel called Twisters that is hitting the big screen this month.

It’s no surprise then that Amazon Prime Video has started streaming its predecessor.

While not quite what you’d call Oscar-worthy, Twister still has that charm characteristic of films from the late ’90s and early 2000s.

For those heading out to see its long belated sequel, Twister still has just enough entertainment to value to make it worth taking for another spin.