SERIES PREMIERE: Netflix has an easy-to-watch, ready-to-binge new series in
GLOW, which premieres today with all 10 half-hour episodes of its comedy-drama available for viewing. It’s a fictional comedy based on a real TV show: a late-Eighties syndicated women’s wrestling show called
Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, or
G.L.O.W. In this salute to that early testament to TV tackiness, Alison Brie – from both
Mad Men and
Community, stars as an unsuccessful actress named Ruth, who attends an audition for a proposed new show about women wrestlers – and, improbably, finds her calling, as well as a gaggle of similarly struggling but ultimately endearing misfits. Betty Gilpin from
Masters of Sex co-stars as a former soap actress contemplating a small-screen return, and Marc Maron made me laugh out loud repeatedly as the burned-out B-list director charged with helping the auditioning women find their wrestling moves and their in-the-ring characters. He gets to deliver, with roaringly dry understatement, what to me is the year’s funniest line of TV dialogue to date, while riffing play-by-play on an early tag-team match: “Not looking good,” he says, “for the white supremacists.”
For my review on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, visit the Fresh Air website. And for full reviews on TVWW,
see Ed Bark’s Uncle Barky’s Bytes and
David Hinckley’s All Along the Watchtower.