IT’S REMINISCENT OF PENNY MARSHALL’S MEMORABLE 1992 FILM, A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN.

workout-tape insistence on selfactualization. The hair is blown high and mighty like angel wings, and the buns are aerobicized into steel. It opens on starving actress Ruth Wilder (Alison brie) as she auditions for a role on a TV series and accidentally (or deliberately) reads the rousing monologue meant for the male character instead of the one-line secretary role for which she’s being considered.

Begging an impatient casting director for a lead on any job whatsoever, Ruth is steered toward Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), a down-on-his-luck film director, whose oeuvre includes such cult bombs as Oedipussy, Swamp Maidens of the Viet Cong and Blood Disco. Sam has been hired by an investor to assemble and train a team of women wrestlers for a new TV enterprise. Sam is turned off by Ruth’s dramaschool seriousness, but she is so desperate for work that she persuades him to keep her around especially good as Carmen, a shy woman who turns out to be wrestling royalty — her father is a pro-wrestling star who has forbidden her from joining the sport.

Sam has ideas about creating a convoluted epic about a planet of lesbians, but his investor, a trust-fund kid named Sebastian “Bash” Howard (Chris Lowell), insists that GLOW will only be successful if it is consistent with male wrestling’s blunt adherence to conflicts between good and evil and the trash talk that transpires between them, with no nuances of grey. Which is why Sam and Bash assign the other women roles based mostly on racist stereotypes. Jenny (Ellen Wong) becomes “Fortune Cookie”; Tamee (Kia Stevens) becomes “The Welfare Queen”; Arthie (Sunita Mani) becomes “Beirut” and dons a kaffiyeh (“He knows I’m not Muslim, right?” she asks).

It eventually dawns on the