GLOW ready to rumble
IN the lovely, lively new Netflix comedy Glow, Alison Brie plays Ruth, a neverhired actress in 1985 Hollywood who stumbles into the world of professional wrestling.
‘‘Every director says ‘Bring me someone I don’t know, someone I haven’t seen, I want a girl who’s real’,’’ a casting director tells Ruth.
‘‘So I bring you in so they can see that they don’t actually want the thing they think they want.’’
Then one day she answers a call for ‘‘unconventional women’’ and finds herself in a gym among actresses of all shapes, colours and dispositions, most of them outsiders in one way or another. Facing them is Sam (Marc Maron), a director of lowbudget horror fare who has been hired to make the world’s first women’s wrestling TV show.
‘‘I like to push the envelope,’’ he says. ‘‘I like to jolt people into consciousness. Like my first feature credit, Swamp Maidens of the Viet Cong.’’
In the way of such stories — The Bad News Bears, A League of Their Own, he is an outsider too — down on his luck but ripe for reinvention.
Created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, with Orange Is the New
Black creator Jenji Kohan as an
executive producer and contributing writer, the series is, broadly speaking, the story of the creation of a TV pilot, Glow:
Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, set back when wrestling was truly subcultural.
Like wrestling itself — the scripted kind, not to wreck any cherished illusions, reader — it is based in stories about sports and show business. (‘‘Are you hiring actors to play wrestlers, or are we wrestlers?’’ Ruth asks Sam. ‘‘Yes,’’ he replies.)
It’s a tale of conflict and cooperation, about teamwork disguised as rivalry, and rivalry subsumed in teamwork, of plucky outsiders fighting for respect and selfrespect. And the story of women living in close proximity has something in common with
Orange Is the New Black; the wrestlers all move into the same motel while they train, and though they are free to leave, one might say they are prisoners of their own need to stay.
Glow was an actual 1980s’ wrestling show, the first to feature women. I have no idea how closely this fiction hews to the historical record, but the series is too wellmade for it to matter one way or the other.
There are ’80s references, to be sure: Steve Guttenberg, Fresca, the Angry Samoans, Scarecrow
and Mrs. King, roller disco, Jane Fondastyle workouts, fashion and the remarkable hairstyles.
But the story takes you into its own, fullyrealised world, including some scenic detours and set pieces not entirely essential to the story. (That is the luxury of the 10episode series.)
Christian Sprenger, whose naturalistic work I’ve admired on
Baskets and Atlanta, has a gift for finding poetry in light and space — he has a respectful eye for things as they are. Indeed, an attitude of respect characterises the entire series; you may finish it with a better opinion of professional wrestling than when you went in. — TCA