Yes! Yes! Yes!—Glow Makes You Proud to Love Wrestling

Glow’s pilot is one of 2017’s best television episodes. It’s funny, dramatic, thrilling, and packs more story into its 37 minutes than a lot of Netflix’s hour-long dramas. Wrestling fans don’t have many things in popular culture that affirm their passions, but for one delirious half-hour, Glow delivers a fantastic ode to the squared circle. The rest of the show pivots closer to classic TV dramedy territory (with mixed results), but for anyone who still pops for a moonsault or prays for a steel-cage match at SummerSlam, you can cling to that first episode like the Macho Man did Miss Elizabeth. It’s the greatest.

Now, Glow was a real wrestling show from the 80s, but the new Glow is more a fictionalized account of making that older show than a reboot of the show itself. In the 80s, Glow (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) was groundbreaking in its premise—in what was then the WWF, female bouts carried cringey stipulations like “bra-and-panties matches,” or “thong matches,” and the storylines mostly positioned the women as accessories to the male wrestlers—but even with its progressive, “women have real stories and real matches” approach, the old Glow was still super exploitative and sexist in its presentation. It was targeted toward young men, and you can imagine all the things that came with that. The new Glow, then, could be forgiven if it positioned itself as a vengeful and reparative show, one that condemned professional wrestling and took it down from within.

The best decision the show makes is to forego that crusade in favor of a more redemptive mission. The modern Glow follows Alison Brie’s elitist theater-snob character as she struggles through L.A.’s shallow actressing scene. She auditions for Glow out of complete desperation, and in the show’s early moments you wonder if the wrestling-rookie perspective will strap the story with a typical, condescending lens when it comes to the ring. WWE fans are all too aware of the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding wrestling, and the worry early on is that Glow will serve to trivialize or mock the world of sports-entertainment.

This never happens, and what becomes clear by the end of the pilot is how much Glow, and the people behind it, love wrestling. A brief “research” montage, in which Alison Brie watches an episode of WWF Superstars featuring Hulk Hogan, is a turning point in the episode. The sight of Alison standing on her bed and reciting the Hulkster’s uber-patriotic, kid-pandering “eat your vitamins” mantra is one of the most joyous things a wrestling fan can see in 2017. When she does the elbow drop onto her mattress? Ring the bell. We’re on our feet.

What a relief it is to find that Glow can both be something empowering and progressive for its female characters (and 2017 audience), but also be completely ecstatic and supportive of its central art form. Wrestling is intrinsically silly, a scripted soap opera in which the characters settle conflict by locking one another inside the Hell in a Cell or throwing one another off ladders, but for all the times Glow wisely skewers the sport’s awful history of caricature and prejudice, it gives us a scene where Betty Gilpin’s character—the best part of the whole show—starts watching a match with her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised, and ends that match with her hands clapping over her head and her voice shrieking cheers over the crowd. No show—not even the WWE itself—has ever made a case for people to watch wrestling. Glow, perhaps by accident, undeniably does. In that sense, it’s vital TV.

It's worth saying that while the pilot carries euphoric highs, the ratio of wrestling to drama does begin to skew further and further toward the latter with each subsequent episode. The season builds toward the taping of the show’s pilot, so rest assured that Glow ends with some solid wrestling action, but the path to the finale is paved with some pendulous, hit-or-miss drama, and just like in real wrestling, the character work can be spotty. Brie and Gilpin are fantastic in isolation and opposite each other, but even with a wide cast of vivid side characters, many of the women see some shoe-horned plots mushed into the show’s back half. Make no mistake, you’re going to care about pretty much everyone on this show, but a few people see a push toward the front that seems to come too soon. Britt Baron’s charming, cute, soft-hearted punk in particular is loaded with a burden that could’ve waited until season two.

But that’s a common symptom of any wrestling show. Sometimes, when things take a turn toward the dramatic, it can come at the expense of the fun. It’s too bad, but it’s forgivable knowing that Glow is trying to be a comedy, a drama, and a wrestling show all at once. It’s best when it’s underscoring the world-weary humor of Marc Maron or throwing Sydelle Noel and Kia Stevens into a tag team match against the KKK, not when it’s steering toward melodrama. Come for the jokes, stay for the wrestling, even if the matches are few and far between. The highs of this show are just worth it.

It’s tempting to think that Glow is here for wrestling fans; it’s not. The pilot might indicate an empowering sports-show with a side helping of drama, but the season as a whole poses a joke-topped drama with some matches for dessert. That’s okay. It’s well enough to have something in 2017 that sees wrestling for what it is: Dumb fun, but legitimate spectacle. Corny soap, but explosive action. Half-baked dramatics, but earnest entertainment. That’s wrestling, and it’s a treat knowing the majority who’ve never seen an Undertaker chokeslam or a Kevin Owens powerbomb finally have a pathway to understand what all the hype is about.