Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s comedy about a shoestring 1985 women’s wrestling show is better made and kinder than its Lycra suggests, and Betty Gilpin is the find. It takes half a season to get going and has more wrestlers than it can use.
GLOW takes a real piece of 1980s television, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and puts a dozen women in a gym to see what they do with each other. Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch created it, with Jenji Kohan among the writers, and the family resemblance to Kohan’s earlier work shows: a female ensemble, one building, comedy that turns serious without warning. It is good. It is also slow to start, overpopulated, and at its best when it stops explaining what it means and simply stages a match.
Alison Brie’s Ruth is hard to like, on purpose. She is earnest, needy and gives every audition more than it wants; Brie plays the neediness straight and lets the comedy come from how little anyone else cares. It works better once Ruth finds her ring persona, a Soviet villain in a leotard, and discovers she is better at being hated than liked. But the series belongs to Betty Gilpin. Debbie arrives as the wronged party and could have stayed there; Gilpin instead plays a woman who is furious, bored, brilliant on camera and appalled that the thing she is best at is a joke. Her matches with Ruth are the only place the two can talk, and the show knows it.
Marc Maron’s Sam Sylvia is a washed-up director with a cocaine habit and a great deal of self-pity, and Maron plays him without asking for sympathy. Chris Lowell’s Bash Howard is the money, a rich boy who loves wrestling more than anyone in the building, and Lowell keeps him sweet rather than stupid. The roster is where the show is generous and where it is overstuffed. Sydelle Noel’s Cherry Bang, a stuntwoman who trains the others, and Britney Young’s Carmen Wade, from a wrestling family and frightened of crowds, get real stories. Gayle Rankin’s Sheila the She-Wolf, who wears the costume off duty too, is the strangest and stays with you. Kate Nash’s Rhonda Richardson, Kia Stevens’s Tameé Dawson and Jackie Tohn’s Melanie Rosen get a scene or two a season and deserved more.
Christian Sprenger and Chris Teague, two of four credited cinematographers, shoot it in flat warm Californian light and do not make the wrestling look better than it would have on a 1985 television. The ring is small, the rig is visible, the crowd is thin. Todd Fjelsted’s production design gives the women a gym with peeling paint, a motel with a pool nobody swims in, and later a Las Vegas hotel as tired as the act it is hosting. Craig Wedren’s synth score behaves like the era’s own television music, cheerful and cheap. Fourteen directors share the three seasons, Lynn Shelton, Jesse Peretz and Alison Brie among them, and the house style holds.
The first full bout, late in the opening season, got at us more than we expected. The show has spent hours watching these women hurt themselves on mats, and when a crowd finally cheers a body slam we felt something for the people who rehearsed it, however absurd the costumes. We laughed at Sheila’s wolf ears and were then slightly ashamed, which is roughly the response the series wants. The matches are shot from ringside and held long enough to see the actors taking the falls, and that is where the warmth is earned: you believe the bruises.
The first three episodes are unsure of their tone, funny and unhappy in the same breath; a couple of critics gave up here, and we can see why, though they were wrong to. The show is fond of the locker-room speech about what all this means for women, and each season has one or two more than it needs. The third season moves the operation to Las Vegas, gets stranger and in places better, and drifts through its middle. It ends after thirty episodes with business unfinished.
Set against Orange Is the New Black, from the same stable, it is smaller, kinder and more disciplined. Watch it in half-hour pieces with someone who will laugh at the leotards, and sit through the shaky opening. By the fifth episode you will have picked a wrestler and be unable to explain why.
