'Stumble' Review: It's Going to Happen, Lainey!

I want to say there isn’t much competition for the best broadcast network comedy of 2025, but that’s not exactly true. There’s a dearth of network television comedies, sure, but there are a few genuinely good ones. Abbott Elementary, of course, although this season has been solid rather than exceptional. St. Denis Medical has actually improved on its first season and is very good. I like Animal Control; Ghosts is decent comfort food, even if it’s highly repetitive; and Bob’s Burgers remains as reliable as ever.

But Stumble? It is legitimately laugh out loud funny every single week. NBC may have buried it on Friday nights, but starting next week, the network is wisely pulling reruns of The Paper on Monday nights after St. Denis to give Stumble a shot at a bigger audience. It deserves one. That said, I worry that, like Trial & Error, another comedy from creator Jeff Astrof (this time with his sister, Liz Astrof), it will toil in obscurity, beloved by critics and quietly canceled all the same.

Give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

It is another mockumentary, this one set in the world of community college cheerleading competitions. Jenn Lyon (Claws) plays Courteney Potter, a cheerleading coach fired from Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College after a scandal. She led the school to multiple cheerleading championships, but the program is now run by her former assistant and current rival, Tammy (Kristin Chenoweth).

Courteney lands at Headlston, a rundown community college, where she assembles a new cheerleading squad made up of misfits and weirdos. Among them are a woman with narcolepsy, an ex con, a woman living out of her car, a former football player, and a thirty something car rental clerk who is allowed to compete because he still has eligibility remaining. Courteney’s moral support comes from her husband, Boon E. Potter (Taran Killam), the football coach at Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College (his running joke is that he was a star football player in high school but because of a violent head injury, he doesn’t remember his high school heroics).

The physical comedy is tremendous. The jokes come a mile a minute and often take a beat or two to fully land. There’s also far more heart here than you might expect from an underdog mockumentary. Beyond its warmth and sharp wordplay, though, Stumble is wildly original. It puts its characters in situations you’d never encounter in a workplace or family sitcom. There’s something new in nearly every episode.

Lainey has been after me to review it for weeks because of her love for Stumble. If you don’t want to take my word for it, take hers:

“Please write an article about Stumble. Please write this article to encourage people to watch it so it doesn’t get canceled. It’s going to get canceled. I like it, so it’s a goner for sure. In this article, please be sure to mention that Jenn Lyon was in Claws, and that Claws was bats*** insane but awesome, and that Jenn was also awesome in it. Please also mention that Taran Killam is very good as well, and that in the first episode there was clearly an homage to a ‘Coach and Tami Taylor’ moment between them. You can also mention that I go back and forth on who I love more, Peaches or Sally. They are both just so great. If you want, you might want to throw in that this show is very similar in sensibility, though not quite as weird, to Trial & Error (which shares a creator and writer), and that show was very close to a masterpiece of comedy. If you need more help writing this, I’m sure someone else can help, but I’m very busy. (Speaking of busy, dear god, Busy Phillips as Peaches’s 20-year-old sister. Hilarious.”)

And yes, Busy Phillips playing a busted, white trash 20-year-old who isn’t old enough to buy alcohol has been one of the show’s best gags. It’s sublime. Every single episode, as my kids would say, is fire. This show cooks.