GLOW season 3 review: the Netflix show gets better and better and better…

Move over season two and three of hit Netflix show, Glow, and welcome season three. And the new season starts with a literal ‘bang’ a catastrophe of real-life events.

Las Vegas, 28 January 1986. Opening night of the spanking new, still playing-to-the-cheap-seats GLOW live stage show. And unfortunately for our easily eclipsed Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling the date of an even more historic event: the live televised launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger and as the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling prepare for their Las Vegas stage show debut, Ruth (Alison Brie) and Debbie (Betty Gilpin) go on a local news program to provide live, in-character commentary during a space shuttle launch (which as we know ended in disaster).

Debbie, as her all-American wrestler persona Liberty Belle, touts the superiority of the U.S. space program, while Ruth, as the Russian heel “Zoya the Destroya,” mocks the “puny rockets” as “not even real”… right up until the Challenger explodes, killing all seven crew members and numbing the watching world.

Culturedemandsgeeks cringed and so did just about everyone else watching the show, and from that moment, you realize ‘are the glamourous ladies in trouble from the start?’

With new scenery, a new Nevada show to perform for the adorning masses, can our ladies find the right balance between personal life and career enhancement?

Season 3 finds everyone on the team adjusting to their new casino-based lives. Living in luxurious hotel suites that eclipse their original motel rooms, the wrestlers, along with director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) and producer Sebastian “Bash” Howard (Chris Lowell), routinely ride the elevator down to a breakfast buffet before commencing with training, shows, and that “Viva Las Vegas!” nightlife.

In its first two seasons, GLOW followed the establishment of a low-budget, cable-TV wrestling league, spearheaded by a coke-addled, grouchy, inexplicably charismatic B-movie director, Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), and produced by Lowell’s trust-fund baby, Bash.

But the most compelling storyline in the show regarded the friendship between the pretentious, perennially unemployed actor Ruth and Debbie (Betty Gilpin), a soap star turned stay-at-home mom who discovered in the first episode that Ruth had been sleeping with her husband.

Sam, witnessing a furious showdown between the two, was inspired to cast Debbie as Liberty Belle—Zoya’s supposed archenemy—transmuting the real-life tension between the women into wrestling gold.

While dialing up the camp and, more seriously, queer volume to Liberace levels in the move from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Overall, GLOW is now an issues-led ensemble piece. Relationships, race, the private calamity of being closeted, eating disorders, immigrant trauma, trying to conceive, working mothers’ guilt, and, always, sexism and misogyny, have become the focus instead of the backdrop.

And nearly the entire season three, we have a lack of wrestling…

But don’t worry…

Because the show grows its characters, resulting in better-developed narratives for the talented ensemble cast. Case point, we start with Cherry Bang (Sydelle Noel) starts considering having kids while Debbie struggles to live four hours from her one-year-old. Sheila “The She Wolf” and the enigmatic Sheila (Gayle Rankin) finds a new idol in a (magnificent) drag performer named Bobby Barnes (Kevin Cahoon), a Barbra Streisand impersonator, motivating both to bare their souls on the stage and off stage, letting their inner-selves come out completely. Tammé (Kia Stevens) tries to push past physical ailments that face any aging wrestler. Carmen is romantically frustrated; Jenny (Ellen Wong) struggles with the racist stereotypes she has to reinforce in the ring every day; Arthie (Sunita Mani) finds it hard to be open about her sexuality.

Also, Sam, who was gloriously awful as the angry, washed-up, sexist cokehead B-movie director for two seasons is now way too nice. And sober. He’s not even gambling … in Vegas! But for Sam, the best part of finding out he’s a father to an aspiring writer, in his daughter, and further on, we do have a touching sequence of father and daughter time.(Sam’s deadpan-as-hell “fuck, I feel like I’m on acid” is a line that pretty much only Marc Maron could make funny.)

Oh, we finally have the fluttery feelings showing too, between Sam and Ruth (finally!)

The side-plot involving Bash Howard’s (Chris Lowell) descent into wrestling promotion dictator, spurred by his ongoing struggle with his own sexuality is a game-changer for the character. He’s recently-married, covering up for the fact that he’s actually, deep-down gay is touching and sweet, and generally emotional to the audience watching.

WHO’S THAT FAMOUS ACTRESS?

There are more off-mat drama and Geena Davis as an ex-showgirl (although never enough of her), as ex-showgirl-turned-entertainment-director Sandy Devereaux St Clair. She can usually be found wafting around the Fan-Tan casino in a leopard print outfit, dripping comedy gold about the good old Vegas days, and proffering free drinks when the chips are down.

There is a downright delightful episode where every one of the G.L.O.W. grapplers switches roles for a night and the Christmas episode is a dime, a great watch where the characters portray the Xmas story of Scrooge.

Even the sex—which GLOW has a lot, of all kinds, shapes, and colors with a refreshing amount of dong on show, for the ladies and gentleman.

GLOW is still consistently funny, even as the series heads into darker territory. (In addition to the spiraling AIDS crisis, the new season weaves in mentions of the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide.)

FINAL THOUGHTS:

When GLOW debuted in 2017, the show over the past three seasons has quickly revealed itself to be about so much more than its Spandexed surface. It’s about ambition, passion, and drive. The characters have evolved and matured; wanting to achieve greater things for themselves. We have moments of clarity and love and emotion, but all in all, we have a group of characters that help one another and grow like a family.

The third season has made the case for a great season 4 …

5/5 STARS