DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
 
 
 
GLOW
June 23, 2017  | By David Bianculli

Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET

 
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.
 
 
 
 
 
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