100 Favorite Shows: #85 — GLOW
“If one of you turns out to be like Hulk Hogan, I’ve hit the fucking jackpot.”
The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (or, G.L.O.W.) was a women’s wrestling team that was founded in Las Vegas in 1986. The group was defined by over-the-top wrestling performances and kooky character creations, as well as a legacy that persists to the present day. In 2017, Netflix first aired a fictionalized series about this circuit, GLOW, which was created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch. In its three seasons (with a fourth and final season cancelled due to COVID), GLOW indulged in plenty of wrestling, but always kept the focus on the characters, who are each fledgling actors devoted to the craft of fake sports. Each episode of GLOW could just as easily see Ruth (Alison Brie) and Debbie (Betty Gilpin) duking it out over Ruth’s affair with Debbie’s husband, Mark (Rich Sommer), or duking it out in the wrestling ring as Zoya the Destroya and Liberty Belle, respectively.
(Ding, ding, ding! Spoilers for GLOW are in this essay’s ring, I reckon.)
It took me a long time to realize wrestling was all for show. Growing up, I knew of wrestlers like Triple H and Andre the Giant and how opponents of WWE stars would often stand idly by while other wrestlers hopped onto ropes and departed the ring to grab folding chairs. But I never thought anything of this flagrant rule breaking. This was before my conceptions of rules in sports were fully formed, so I just accepted wrestling as it was presented. Once I learned about the nature of the entertainment behind it, though, it took me longer to understand that wrestling itself was just a version of a sport. The stunts performed by the actors required dexterity, strength, flexibility. Yes, the winners were predetermined, but the effort put into the matches was just as valuable.
GLOW helped bring me closer to this understanding. It was filled with plenty of campy fun as it authentically emulated the absurdity of wrestling culture. However, Flahive and Mensch also fully embraced this culture. Many series would feel the need to be tongue-in-cheek regarding their reverence for wrestling to avoid coming across as laughable. Not GLOW, though. The true subversion of GLOW came in that it saw the vulnerability behind the wrestlers and their cartoonish personas, honoring it with emotional honesty and empathy.
GLOW took wrestling as it was, but never painted it solely as a silly brand of cheap thrills. It illustrated the initial devotion to crafting something heartfelt and genuine even when the G.L.O.W. team was just a 1980s-clad traveling troupe with performers who wrestled instead of auditioning. From there, GLOW tracked the growing complexities that came with stardom, as Sandy Devereaux St. Clair (Geena Davis) turns up in season three to offer a Las Vegas residency to the women (many of whom are wary to uproot their lives for a year). Women’s wrestling, to the public, developed from a joke to a commodity, but GLOW never forgot the human hearts at the center of the show.
After all, there were true stakes and drama beyond the humor, campiness, and wrestling of GLOW’s initial appeal. The show springboards with Ruth’s capital betrayal of her best friend, weaving in and out of various emotional reservations (it takes a long time to rekindle the friendship) and misguided romantic pursuits. As a character study, GLOW excelled by treating every character with well-rounded authenticity, devoting the necessary time to understanding what else a wrestler endures when she’s enjoying the parts of her day that are outside of a wrestling ring.
GLOW led with Ruth, a struggling actor who yearned to be more than the stereotypical roles she auditioned for on the page. In her eagerness to prove herself to others, Ruth spends the most time of anyone workshopping the wrestling character she wants to bring to the stage. It’s not just about carving out a starring role for herself in a performance that could go on for years; it’s about fulfilling the promise she made to herself to never settle for a “nothing” part and to always make the most of the opportunities afforded to her as an actor. Brie’s stripped-down performance embodies many of the trying-her-best qualities of past characters (namely Annie on Community), but it also shows a more vulnerable side to her comedic persona.
Ruth was only as good as her scene partners, though, and Betty Gilpin’s Debbie was the true breakout star of the series. Gilpin turned in the best performance of the series, saying so much by emoting so little (most of the time). Every now and then, Gilpin showcased her capacity to launch into an emotional monologue with the best of them, but for the most part, the performance relies on interior strength as much as Debbie is persistent to show she relies on no one else. A bit detached, but with her heart in every interpersonal moment, the emotionally reserved Debbie shines at every turn.
The other revelation of GLOW is Marc Maron, who delivered a career-best performance as the manager of the wrestling squad, Sam Sylvia. As the director of B-movies who pivoted to a hokey wrestling conceit, Maron depicts the type of salt-and-pepper has-been he was close to becoming in his own life. By infusing these interior Maron qualities into a similarly neurotic character, the Sam Sylvia creation seems wholly lived-in, as if it’s Maron’s long-lost twin. He’s funny, especially when displaying surprise when the G.L.O.W. endeavor proves to be successful, but he’s also forever frayed by a world that carelessly spit his dreams back at him. Ultimately, it’s just delightful to watch Maron find a role best suited to his talents after all these years.
GLOW is also a populated with a number of exuberant personalities portrayed by actors I’d never heard of before the series. Cherry Bang (Sydelle Noel), the experienced member of the team who is on the same trajectory as Sam. Carmen “Machu Picchu” Wade (Britney Young), the newbie struggling to fit in with her first group of friends and the belief from others that she’s “sexless.” Rhonda “Britannica” Richardson (Kate Nash), the British woman determined to greet everyone with the kindness rarely afforded to her. (I did know one supporting player before GLOW and I must say it was super cool to see Chris Lowell dazzling on the screen as the showy, but sensitive Bash Howard.) Each of them bring depth to GLOW as the series was intent on giving them all moments to shine, as if they were side characters in a Greta Gerwig film.
Sheila the She Wolf (Gayle Rankin), a shy, isolated performer who ends up rooming with Ruth, was arguably the best breakout supporting character from the series’ first season. In season one, Sheila is a recurring character, but she does have one episode that somewhat revolves around her own identity in the form of the fourth installment, “The Dusty Spur” (directed by Melanie Mayron and written by Sascha Rothchild).
The episode opens with Sheila applying her makeup and securing her canine-implied wig to the rhythm of Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town.” It’s hard for Sheila to make friends, but she acts like this doesn’t bother her, which is in contrast to Ruth, who has an obvious need to be liked by others. When the G.L.O.W. team is booked in an Olympic Village-type close quarters motel for bonding purposes (they’re not allowed to do drugs here, even though Sam and Bash stumbled upon the idea while tripping), Ruth and Sheila are paired together and are immediately standoffish with one another.
Sheila demands a specific level of silence while she sleeps and Ruth tries multiple times to engage Sheila in introductory conversations — to no avail. Eventually, when Sheila slips and reveals her true hair beneath the wig, Ruth shrugs it off in an effort to endear herself to the She Wolf. However, Sheila retorts quickly that the wig is for her own pleasure, her own connection to wolves in the world. Desperate to smooth over the affront, Ruth relates Sheila’s need for a wig to her own experience wearing an Anne of Green Gables-inspired straw hat to navigate her own depression.
It’s a moment that seems to pierce Sheila’s stoic shell. Yet, it’s still not enough to bond them to the point where Sheila doesn’t feel the need to kick Ruth out of the motel room in the name of privacy. It’s one episode of many for GLOW, but it points both us and Ruth in the right direction, showing that progress is being made in the name of friendship.
In this sense, GLOW is largely concerned with the theme of teamwork and unity in the face of adversity, whether that be systemic, underlying forms of discrimination across institutions and industries or simply the personal identity crisis of a woman wearing a wig. Teamwork always mattered most and this was as recurring a motif on GLOW as the show’s need to remind us that the series is set during the 1980s. There’s plenty of evidence of that (the soundtrack, which features killer needle drops like the aforementioned Dream Academy, Dolly Parton, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, David Bowie; clips of the Challenger explosion with immediate regret from Ruth’s anti-patriotism character) in every episode. However, it also manifests in the form of using the theme of teamwork to undercut the pervasive Reagan-era greed lurking behind the concepts of commodification, familial loyalty, and Las Vegas showrooms.
Just as the women in G.L.O.W. found a deeper way to bond while in isolation with one another at the motel (in addition to Ruth and Sheila, Carmen and Rhonda foster a connection), so too are these unions reinforced on another trip, when the team goes camping in season three’s “Outward Bound.” By now, lifelong friendships have been formed and antagonistic squabbles have been squashed (Ruth and Debbie spend the majority of the installment apart from the other women). On the one hand, this allows for moments between Ruth and Sheila to feel like the earned pay-offs of three seasons of emotional development between them as friends (Sheila tearfully confides in Ruth, “There are so many things that I want to do. And become.”) On the other, “Outward Bound” is also a pivotal episode for addressing the feelings of discrimination and stereotyping many of the women on the team have, allotting them the space to feel heard.
As the ladies gather around the campfire, the stories they tell and the jokes they laugh at slowly morph into tearful confessionals about the discomfort they feel in their own skin and how it hurts when others deepen the impact of that oppression. Jenny (Ellen Wong) is severely wounded by the legacy of trauma in her family that resulted in her portraying a character named “Fortune Cookie” on the stage and having a stereotypical Chinese accent mocked by someone who’s supposed to be her friend, Melanie “Melrose” Rosen (Jackie Tohn).
This leads to Melanie confessing her own sense of impostor syndrome when her Jewish ancestors survived the Holocaust (and some didn’t) and she spends her time debating whether or not to spend a year in Las Vegas. Initially, her stories of her heritage are positioned as a competition of cultural trauma against Jenny, who is desperate to teach Melanie the difference between intent and impact when it comes to racial affronts. But as more women speak out (Arthie (Sunita Mani) is sick of her wrestling characters being built on geopolitics, Yolanda (Shakira Barrera) is annoyed by how she must pretend to be straight), the sense that they must one-up each other’s identity crises falls away in favor of apologies, group hugs, and an understanding that everyone struggles and no one has to pretend everything is fine.
“Outward Bound” remains GLOW’s finest half-hour because of this express commitment to interrogating the cultural stereotypes displayed in a wrestling ring for the sake of rallying up the crowds. It interrogates the complicated web of feelings the women are forced to endure just so they can feel comfortable slapping spandex on and indulging even the basest intentions of their personas. It shows that the world of wrestling is so much more than just training to hit someone with a chair in a spot that won’t hurt them.
In this same episode, Ruth and Debbie wind up lost on a hike together in the wilderness, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of spending a year in Las Vegas. Brie and Gilpin were so dynamite as adversaries that part of me missed the chemistry that came from their opposition. But as Ruth confessed her feelings for Sam (more of an example of her inability to foster a healthy romance than an actual endgame shipping for the series, though we’ll never know for sure) and I saw Debbie express genuine bewilderment before asking Ruth about the truth behind her emotions, I realized their chemistry was just as gripping when they embodied the sentiments of unity that were unlocked by the campfire they missed out on.
The women on GLOW are empowered by their ability to give in to characters on stage, but they are most empowered when they experience support from the women along for the ride with them. The struggles of one will not necessarily compare to the struggles of another, but they don’t have to either. They’re all on the same level (promotional vehicles for Sam and Bash to make a shit ton of money) and they all have the same goals: to be happy, to be heard, to love. They can’t tear each other down or dismiss their concerns as inferior to one’s own shortcomings. The more the women on GLOW supported one another, the more they thrived. With the support of one’s peers, the idea that everything must be okay all the time washes away. It’s not necessarily a notion we see all the time in wrestling or in the 1980s, but it’s palpable throughout the sweet (and slightly sardonic) tone of GLOW. After all, there’s plenty of time to hurt one another in the ring.
