Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Ladies who PUNCH
GLOW tells the story of the women wrestlers of the 1980s who battled their way to the top
Forget orange – pink spandex is the new black. As modelled by the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, or GLOW, it’s the uniform of a Netflix series that is threatening to scoop up the top TV awards for both comedy and drama.
And if you’re not sure about sequined swimsuits worn over Lycra leggings, or jeans with a waistband that sits around the ribs, then perhaps you aren’t old enough to remember the 1980s… or the US wrestling craze that launched superstars such as Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura.
Based on a true story, GLOW follows a dozen out- of-work actresses and misfits as they attempt to win fame with an all-female wrestling show on an obscure cable TV channel. The fact that none of them knows the first thing about fighting, and that their director is a washed-up auteur of straight-to-video schlock horror movies, doesn’t deter them.
At the heart of the series is a web of friendships and feuds between the almost entirely female cast. We learn about their abandoned families, their failed loved affairs and broken dreams, as they grapple with constant set-backs – and each other.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because GLOW was created and produced by Jenji Kohan, Tara Herrmann and Carly Mensch – the same team that came up with Orange Is The New Black, the runaway Netflix success centred around a women’s prison.
Set in Hollywood at the height of the fashion craze for legwarmers and aerobics, GLOW stars Alison Brie ( best-known as snooty wife Trudy Campbell from Mad Men) playing Ruth, a stage actress who can’t get a walk- on part in any production, no matter how desperately she auditions.
Ruth has taken to hiding in cubicles in the ladies’ loos, to ambush producers. She’s living in a slum apartment, begging from her parents to buy food, and her self-esteem is at rock bottom… which is why she makes the terrible mistake of sleeping with her best friend’s husband.
‘I like the idea that we’re not quite sure if she’s a good person,’ says Alison. ‘Other people don’t like her, even though she’s trying her hardest, in earnest.’
Ruth is so desper a te to raise her profile that she’s willing to play the villain in the GLOW ring, and be booed. Adopting a pantomime per- sona, as Zoya the Destroya, a KGB agent set on destroying the American way of life, she urges the audiences to hate her. But a villain needs a hero to defeat her: enter Liberty Belle, the all-American wrestling gal. Liberty is a bubblegum blonde in a Stars and Stripes catsuit, whose battlecry is freedom. She hates Communists. But she hates Ruth a lot more – because Liberty is the alter ego of Debbie Eagan, the woman whose husband Ruth slept with.
The two women have to learn how
to fight each other in the ring, without murdering each other outside it. And Debbie, the kind of cheerleader prom queen who expects to be popular, makes sure all the GLOW girls regard Ruth as a homewrecker.
That’s an enmity which director Sam Sylvia (played by stand-up comedian Marc Maron) intends to exploit to the hilt. Sam is selfish, rude, arrogant and hilariously watchable – so obnoxious that you find yourself liking him. An inveterate cocaine user, the drug has made him chronically mistrustful and edgy. ‘I’m not paranoid,’ he snaps at one lover. ‘Who told you that?’
Sam doesn’t bother to hide his contempt for female wrestlers – both the women in his charge, and the concept itself. He’s making the show only because gormless financier Bash (Chris Lowell) has promised in return to produce the ‘serious’ script Sam has been schlepping round Hollywood for years.
Bash is the sort of trust-fund rich kid the 80s dreamed of, living in a Malibu mansion with a butler and a robot, and commuting everywhere by helicopter. But he’s completely reliant on his parents’ money – and if that dries up, GLOW could go broke.
The two men are determined to sell the show to a cable network and tap into the lucrative family viewing slots, with all the possibilities for action figurines and merchandise that could entail. Sam’s sales pitch isn’t exactly honed, though. Lining up the girls in their revealing costumes, he boasts to one TV executive, ‘This is porn you can watch with your kids!’
Added to all this pizzazz is a fabulous 80s soundtrack. Each episode features one song played in full – for instance, Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure pulses and grinds while a character struggles with an 80s pregnancy testing kit that is more like a chemistry set.
There’s a terrific attention to period detail too, whether it’s in the shabby motel rooms, the roller discos or the neon graphics that open every episode. But what will really hook you – or maybe get you in a headlock – are the characters.