“They’re going to be wrestling with their own female stereotypes!” pitches the director of GLOW, a new entertainment for the huge-haired, aerobics-obsessed, coked-up 1980s America. This, he continues, ought to endear it to female audiences, while its male appeal will be self-explanatory. “It’s porn you can watch with your kids!” enthuses Marc Maron, playing B-movie-director wash-up Sam Sylvia. “Finally!”
Glow (Netflix, now streaming), Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch's new comedy based on the real Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling phenomenon, doesn't see the project as anything quite so high-minded or anywhere near as low. The optimism of the new show is that Glow can be whatever they make it.
For Alison Brie's protagonist, Ruth Wilder, that is a chance to create herself: a struggling actress in LA, she sees professional wrestling as a place where actresses might struggle more profitably. Brie, who on Community and Mad Men was girlish, preppy and slightly cracked, is here more fraught and rangy (she trained extensively for the role). Like Orange is the New Black though (Jenji Kohan is a producer), this provides the show with a less interesting protagonist than its wider, diverse ensemble.
The stereotypes with which these women wrestle are bundled into an amusingly goofy 1980s nostalgia, where Reagan-era chauvinism comes with back-combed hairdos and squeaky synthesizers, and second-wave feminism meets amped-up training montages.
Here, an Indian woman plays Beirut, an Arab terrorist; a Cambodian plays the orientalist nightmare Fortune Cookie; and one black performer is simply The Welfare Queen. Initially they resist the slurs, but popularity puts politics in a chokehold. Like Brie, they discover the benefits of playing “the heel”, wrestling’s villain.
What does it say, though, that one of Ruth’s nicknames, The Homewrecker, has been well earned? Having betrayed her friend Debbie (Betty Gilpin), a former soap-opera actress recruited to be GLOW’s all-American star, Ruth may resist every call for a “cat fight”, yet the show keeps trailing that dynamic.
Its fizzier irony, though, when Ruth becomes a comically taunting Soviet, an ultra-heel, is that only by regaining trust can she and Debbie play mortal enemies in the ring.
It’s an enjoyable confection about empowerment and the media, made more so by the fact that the real women of GLOW finally acquired the franchise, spurring a documentary and now this show.
In one rhetorical flourish, Sam asks his wrestlers what they give the audience. "Blood!" calls one. "Tits!" says another. "Storytelling, ladies," he insists. Glow has it all.
- Glow is available to stream on Netflix from Friday, June 23rd
