PinterestPart sports drama, part showbiz satire, part birth-of-the-modern-woman allegory — all heartbreaking glitter-blasted humanity — Netflix’s GLOW is unlike any show I’ve ever seen. I love it so much; it made me laugh, cry, think, and pump my fists in the air screaming, “YESYESYES!” It’s 1985 and Alison Brie is Ruth Wilder, a struggling Los Angeles actress we meet mid-audition, delivering swaggery TV-protagonist lines like “I will not be bullied into submission!
” Audition finished, Ruth gushes to the casting agents, “There are not roles like this for women right now!” She’s right, actually. She was reading “the man’s part.” (The woman’s part, in totality: “Your wife is on line two.”)Opportunity beckons, ridiculous yet empowering, like true camp always is. A fading B-movie director (Marc Maron) is casting a TV project called “GLOW,” an acronym for “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.” Ruth takes to the kitschy beefcakery of pro wrestling like it’s an experimental art project. And the great thing about GLOW is how it takes that idea seriously, fictionalizing the real-life “Ladies” into an emotional-philosophical battleground for heightened emotions and Big Ideas.
The show examines stereotypes, hyperbolizes them, then deconstructs them. Real-life wrestler Kia Stevens plays a struggling actress named Tamee, who gets cast as “Welfare Queen,” the very name an echo of Reagan-era politics. Welfare Queen is supposed to be a villain – a “heel,” in wrestling nomenclature – but Tamee plays the role to such hilarious excess that the audience begins to root for her. Both audiences, really: The one onscreen, watching the wrestling, and us here, watching show.
That sounds meta, and GLOW certainly thrills to show-within-a-show gamesmanship: The…The post GLOW is unlike any show we’ve ever seen appeared first on FeedBox.