‘GLOW,’ a show about female wrestling, has a strong hold
The new Netflix dramedy “GLOW” wrestles with female stereotypes and comes up an amusing winner.
The series has almost too ripe a setting: an all-female pro-wrestling show in the 1980s, an era of spandex, heavy-duty hair spray, Madonna-inspired fashion, glitzy videos and awful rock anthems.
Yet the show manages to be fun and wacky, funny, emotional with something to say.
“GLOW” — Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling — is from Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch (“Nurse Jackie”) and produced by Jenji Kohan, who created “Orange Is the New Black.” Like that show, “GLOW” has a diverse, quirky female cast. So don’t be fooled by its campy elements.
(By the way, there was a real “GLOW” in the late-’80s, but this is fictionalized.)
Alison Brie plays a downon-her-luck or maybe downon-talent actress in Hollywood. We meet her delivering an intense monologue. It’s an audition, and she’s reading the man’s part because it is juicier, instead of the role of the secretary, which she is up for.
Ruth doesn’t get the part, and the small-town girl is at wit’s end and running out of money. A casting director suggests soft-core porn in the Valley. “You don’t have to have sex unless you want to.” Not that desperate yet, she answers a casting call for “unconventional women.”
The audition is being run by Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), a low-rent writer-director of “trashy vampire movies.” He has managed to get backing from a food-company heir (Chris Lowell) for a female wrestling show on cable TV, which was in its infancy.
The casting call brings out an eclectic group of females of all sizes and shapes. Sam’s kind of a jerk. “You remind me of my ex-wife,” he says to one of the women, cutting her without giving her a chance to audition.
“Do people think you’re pretty?” he asks Ruth, adding, “Ruth is not a great name.” Of course, Ruth sees herself as a serious actress, so goes Method on him, and he’s ready to toss her.
The director is trying to sort out who he’s going cast when Ruth’s best friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), a former soap actress who recently had a baby, roars into the gym. She’s just learned that Ruth has slept with her husband, and the two really go at it.
Suddenly, in a fantasy scene, Sam envisions the pair as the rivals he needs to focus the show. But the elaborate backstory he has for the show quickly clashes with the producer’s vision. He just wants a bunch of woman grappling in spandex. And like men’s wrestling, he wants stereotypes for people to root for or against.
So he goes all-in on the stereotypes: the IndianAmerican girl, Arthie (Sunita Mani), becomes “Beirut,” a Lebanese terrorist; a Cambodian immigrant (Ellen Wong) is made into the Chinese “Fortune Cookie”; an African-American woman (Kia Stevens), who has managed to send her son to Stanford, gets called “the Welfare Queen.”
Since everyone needs a job — including Sam — they are all willing to walk the line, trying to embrace the roles they have been given without being degraded and depressed by them.
It’s a tricky premise, but “GLOW” pulls it off like Stone Cold Steve Austin’s Stunner. (What is that? An unexpected punch to the gut — or at least that is what I read.)
“Are we wrestling or are we actors playing wrestlers,” Ruth asks Sam. “Ah, yeah,” he replies. He tells the cast he wants them to display moves “that look like a catfight with dancing,” as well as some unprintable things.
That’s the enjoyment of “GLOW.” It’s about image and fakeness while being real, and as the series goes on everybody grows beyond the stereotypes that you see them as when they are first introduced.
Maron is simply a hoot. Sam wants to be taken seriously but knows he traffics in B-movie fare. In some ways, he’s incredibly sexist, and in other ways, he’s incredibly self-aware — sensitive even — and sympathetic to his female cast.
Brie (“Community”) makes Ruth just bad enough as an actress to be believable and ambitious enough to make her unlikable, but she is never unsympathetic. She’s sort of an underdog villain. Gilpin is quite strong as Debbie, someone who thought she beat the acting game but is still hungry. As for the rest of the cast, you’ll just have to meet them. They’re worth it.