GLOW is not a TV show unwilling to speak its mind. At any given time, GLOW will happily allow its characters to turn subtext into text to discuss matters of race, gender, power, sexuality, and stereotyping. Because the show-within-the-show, G.L.O.W., trades in outsized personalities and caricatured appearances, it gives license for the characters within GLOW to speak frankly and openly about same. Because GLOW’s writers and ensemble cast are so good at what they do (and here I will remind anyone and everyone that GLOW is easily one of Netflix’s best shows, and one of the best shows on TV right now, full-stop), this never becomes obnoxious or pedantic the way that, say, Aaron Sorkin shows can get when everything freezes so Mr. Writer Man can use the pretty actor people as mouthpieces for long-winded tracts on How Society Should Be.
On GLOW the characters behave and interact like actual believable human beings, and the socio/cultural material arises organically from their very human conflicts and empathetically communicated points of view. One episode in season two found series protagonist Ruth (Alison Brie) fleeing from what we in today’s world would call a #MeToo moment, and the way that other characters reacted (some immediately communicating support, others expressing fury that she turned away a powerful executive who can [and does] hurt the show) not only did a remarkable job communicating the different attitudes and actions taken by people caught up in a toxic, masculine system, but those reactions (and Ruth’s reaction to the reactions) drove forward several storylines, deeply impacting relationships that continued to play out for the remainder of the season (and presumably will for future seasons, whenever Netflix gets around to renewing it. Hint, hint).
But GLOW has also mastered another kind of storytelling, a subtler kind. Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch and their writing staff showed a real knack for it in the first season, and they prove themselves absolute masters now in the second. On GLOW, entire storylines play out in the margins of the main action, communicated not by revelatory dialogue and exposition, but by glances, asides. GLOW knows how and when to shut up and let the camera sit on a performer’s face and let shifting expressions of horror or elation tell you all that you need to know.
Sometimes, this narrative tact is deployed for a good ol’ fashioned misdirect. In season one, Justine (Britt Baron) often came across as tongue-tied and overly-eager whenever she interacted with Sam (Marc Maron), the burned-out trash cinema auteur now directing the G.L.O.W. show. The characters in the show (and by extension, the audience) attributed this to Justine being a fan of Sam’s cultishly popular work, an assumption backed up by Justine occasionally revealing a depth of knowledge about Sam’s filmography that surprised even Sam, coked-up husk that he is (Maron’s great on this show, as this character, btw). So it was quite a gasp-inducing moment when Justine revealed to Sam that she wasn’t a hungry young starlet, or an eager groupie…she was his daughter, and she insinuated herself into his newest production in the hopes of getting to know the father who didn’t even know she existed.
A similar reversal plays out in season two, as we are introduced early on to Yolanda (Shakira Barrera), a new wrestler on the show who happens to be an out-and-proud lesbian. Yolanda’s cheerful discussion of her hunger for a, ahem, very particular taste (“I haven’t gotten any pussy since joining your straight-as-fuck all-women wrestling show” is the exact line, I believe) causes vocal discomfort from season one holdover Arthie (Sunita Mani). In that moment, the automatic assumption is that Arthie’s discomfort with Yolanda’s frankness signifies a homophobic streak that will manifest in ugly ways going forward. Instead, over the rest of the season you watch as, almost wordlessly, the bond between the two women grows deeper and richer until it surprises both you the viewer and them the characters that they are playing out a love story. Their kiss in the finale is electric, and as the season wraps up with a dozen or so riffs on The Graduate’s closing moment silent contemplation, Arthie and Yolanda gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes are perhaps the only two people who seem content with where they are, and who they are there with.
Could the show have gone the more traditional route and played up Arthie and Yolanda as a will they/won’t they item, the way the show has with Ruth and Sam? I guess, yeah. But there’s an immediacy and a purity to the relationship in this form that I don’t know would exist if it was something that was dragged out over the hours (like the Ruth and Sam thing, which is well-written and very well-played, but often seems like a distraction from the real meat of the show, which is the women and their craft). We don’t need Yolanda or Arthie to deliver a long declaration of love because by the time the show makes good on their coupling, we know those characters so well that we don’t need them to. We understand the aching need Arthie feels to try and figure out who she is, and we understand why the lively and self-possessed Yolanda would respond to that need.
When you have as large an ensemble as GLOW does, and you have only 10 half hour episodes to work with, this method of storytelling is a good way to make sure that everyone gets something to do. And when you are dealing with the heavily serialized style of Netflix shows, seeding stories in this manner makes binge-viewing rewarding, as off-handed lines and references take on deeper meaning as shows progress and details amass. Keeping with Arthie, she was often seen with various textbooks throughout the first season, textbooks that are never seen during the early going of season two. When Arthie brings this up to Sam around the season’s midpoint and explains why she had the books/why she no longer has them, it comes across not as a show scurrying to hang a lampshade on an underdeveloped character, but a show whose scope is widening, a close-up expanding into a wide-shot with room for richer, deeper stories. Pretty much all of the women who make up G.L.O.W., even the most seemingly minor and gimmicky, have their share of moments and sequences like this, and it seems fair to assume that the show will continue to give them room to bloom as it continues.
And then there’s Bash.
Bash (Chris Lowell) is GLOW’s masterpiece of unspoken story. Introduced to us as a coke-loving but kind-hearted rich boy, Sebastian “Bash” Howard’s evolution over the course of GLOW’s two seasons has emerged almost entirely through unspoken moments of performance and intimation, so much so that I keep seeing people online completely fail to pick up what Flahive and Menshch are laying down. So let’s start with what I think is a given:
Bash is gay.
Bash being gay has always been there in the subtext of the show (the biggest clue being that Bash is used to highlight every possible element of 80’s douchery [while still being immensely loveable thanks to smart writing and a charming performance by Lowell]; yet not only has he never shown even the slightest of attraction to any of the scantily clad women that surround him every day, he’s never been depicted in the private company of any women, outside his mom, ever. Instead, Bash spends all his time with his ‘butler’ and childhood best friend, Florian (Alex Rich).
Here’s my read on the character, based on what GLOW has depicted thus far: Bash was a very lonely and deeply closeted kid who bonded with another lonely, closeted kid, and the two channeled their burgeoning, ‘shameful’ desires for one another into a shared love of wrestling. As they grew older, Bash kept finding excuses to keep Florian in his life, and the two parlayed Bash’s money into a means to keep Neverland alive. But when that gradually stopped being enough, Bash used that cash to manufacture the kind of family that he was denied/has denied himself for years. Florian, who maybe wasn’t quite as deep into denial as Bash, eventually got tired of waiting for Bash to realize how deep his affections truly ran and took off for San Francisco, where he tragically contracted the AIDS virus and died.
Damn.
None of this is explicitly stated anywhere in the show, but it is readily apparent within not only Lowell’s performance (which truly is remarkable. Watch his face when he unwittingly accompanies a couple of the G.L.O.W. girls into a gay bar. It rocks with confusion, horror, and then a heartbreaking sense of longing) but also in the characterization laced throughout the writing and direction. The introduction of Yolanda, cheerfully blunt about both her orientation and sex life, in season two highlights the layers of repression under which Bash operates. His orientation doesn’t go unspoken because the show is bashful (natch) about such things, it goes unspoken because Bash himself is in such deep denial, is so unable to articulate who he is, that this sense of self is only available in snatches and glances, tiny moments that he allows himself only when absolutely no one is looking (in maybe the saddest scene of GLOW, a very funny show that every so often just goes ahead and gets suuuuuuuuuuuuper real, Bash keeps checking over his shoulder to make sure that none of the cleaning crew he hired to bleach every trace of Florian out of his life can see him weeping as the enormity of this loss finally settles on him).
As they will happily tell you, Flahive and Mensch did not come to the story of G.L.O.W. as wrestling fans, but as theater kids who found themselves entranced by the performative aspect of professional wrestling. Their version of GLOW focuses less on the mechanics of wrestling (to the consternation of actual wrestlers/wrestling fans, understandably) and instead leans into the notion of wrestling as artistic expression, with the emphasis on how a character’s emotional journey and day-to-day life gets translated into the performance (Ruth, for example, recreates her #MeToo close brush as a goofy comedy sketch on the show, one that ends with the aggressive male getting, literally, served up on a platter).
GLOW the show (that rhyme is irritating as hell, let me tell ya), then, is obsessed with the nature of performance, not only in the ring/on camera but in daily life. Something as simple as saying, “I’m fine” after being asked how’s it going can be laden down with contradictions and evasions, and part of the tension that GLOW exploits is how actual conflicts and desires get interwoven with the larger-than-life show that the women in front of the camera, and the men behind it, create. By establishing these stories in such a way that requires you, the audience, to pay attention and put two-and-two together, there is both a richness and a sense of engagement that would not be present if the show laid all its cards on the table with cookie cutter exposition. That it lets you intuit the connection between Yolanda and Arthie is what makes their final union so meaningful, and that it lets you experience Bash’s repression and heartache in the same halting manner that he must feel it will only make the eventual cathartic explosion, whatever form that takes, all the more heartrending or uplifting or whatever direction the show takes him in.
There are Netflix shows that seem designed more to be time-sucks than solid investments of your time, shows that appear to have been created with the understanding that they will be playing in the background all day while people half-watch as they Tweet and Facebook and avoid work and etc. Information gets repeated ad nauseum, stories spin their wheels to fill up hours, and characters vacillate between states of inaction.
GLOW is not a show you can half-watch and get the full experience. GLOW demands that you give something of your mind and heart to these characters, just as the characters come to realize that they must give something sincere of themselves if they want to succeed. It can be worrying, even downright scary, to invest in something that deeply. Easier instead to keep an ironic distance with your mouth firmly closed. But whether GLOW is depicting two former friends finally having it out after months of barely-masked aggression, or two new friends discovering they mean so much to each other, the show argues that honest expression is the only way to deal with something, and empathy for others is the only way to better understand and start to heal yourself.
Theater kids…that’s how they get ya.
