Television
THE fun and forthright Glow (premiering today on Netflix) is a 10-episode dramedy about the nascent days of televised female professional wrestling, in which a disparate group of underemployed actresses, models, party girls and unwitting introverts are recruited by a greaseball B-movie director to try something that’s never been done before.
Along the way, they experience the sexist slights and tell-tale self-discoveries that have come to signify the basic shape of TV’s newfound interest in feminism.
Whether serving time in prison (Orange Is the New Black), angling for a byline (the lamentably cancelled Good Girls Revolt), seeking identity as a newly declared woman (Transparent), challenging outdated ideas of decorum (I Love Dick) or, far more darkly, trying to survive fascist rule (The Handmaid’s Tale), the stories of women on TV these days zero in on the struggle to simply break through.
In Glow’s case, the goal is to master the physically demanding stagecraft of pro wrestling, with some shred of dignity intact. The women who form Glow – “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling” – a real-life 1980s TV sensation on which this show is loosely based, must endure a series of humiliations and reckon with personal compromises.They must also learn to set aside their differences and co-operate. From the wrestling ring, their sisterly empowerment arises.
Glow’s frivolous but exhilarating note of triumph can be seen as a terrific dessert to The Handmaid’s Tale’s depressing dystopia as well as the prison-riot stand-off that preoccupies the latest season of Orange Is the New Black.
But what exactly is the triumph that Glow depicts? The conquering of cheap entertainment? The promise of marginal showbiz wages? The adrenalin rush? Though its characters are tasked with pleasing a male-driven marketplace, it seems content to revel mostly in physical accomplishment. It’s also a kind of birthing story, the creation from scratch of a set of make-believe characters known to wrestling fans as heroes and heels.
Glow is set in 1985 – the most vintage slice of the Reagan era, which is perfectly depicted in all its Dynasty notions of glamour and insistence on self-actualisation. The hair is blown high and mighty like angel wings, and the buns are aerobicised 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 cult bombs Oedipussy, Swamp Maidens of the Viet Cong and Blood Disco. He has been hired by an investor to assemble and train a team of women wrestlers for a new TV enterprise.
Glow is created by Liz Flahive (executive producer of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie) and Carly Mensch (also of Nurse Jackie and Weeds). It also includes Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds and Orange Is the New Black, as an executive producer. As such, Glow feels very much of the Kohan school, which celebrates working-class women whose common trait is an instinct for survival.
The aspiring, if dubious, amateur wrestlers in Glow include Cherry Bang (Sydelle Noel), a black stunt woman with limited job opportunities, and Sheila