‘GLOW’ Season 2 Is The Best Thing Netflix Has Ever Produced

Season 2 of GLOW is so good that it was hard to rip my eyeballs away from the screen to write this review. It may just be the best season of television Netflix has produced to date. Bold words? Sure, but I’m struggling to remember the last time I’ve seen a season of television that delivered so perfectly across the board. There’s comedy, drama, action, thrills, spills, stand alone episodes that fit seamlessly into the overarching plot, and satire. Plus GLOW Season 2 manages to avoid the dreaded issue of Netflix “bloat” — you know, that thing where shows lose their steam because of too much filler.

GLOW Season 2 is really, really, really good.

The first season of GLOW followed a group of women learning how to see themselves in a new light, and Season 2 is about the frustrating caps put on women’s potential. The show isn’t so much responding to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements as much as it is depicting them in real time. After all, this new season of GLOW deals with the stress of producing a ladies’ wrestling show at the height of the 1980s. So we see our heroines attempting to dodge the dangers of the casting couch, all while fighting for a say in the show itself.

When we talk about how #MeToo and #TimesUp have filtered into pop culture, we’re usually talking almost exclusively about scenes of sexual assault and harassment popping up on our favorite TV shows. GLOW delves into the controversy in the typical ways — as it does in an episode where one character has to take an uncomfortable dinner meeting in a hotel room — but the show also goes deeper to lay bare what these oppressive politics really mean.

When other shows have tiptoed into this conversation, it’s felt a tiny bit like a response to a trend. In the case of GLOW, however, it is the story. A ladies’ wrestling show in the 1980s — heck, in any era — would tussle with the issues of misogyny. GLOW deals with sexism and racism with nuance, and in horrifyingly natural ways. At the start of the season, Ruth, Debbie, and the rest of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling find themselves repeatedly stymied in the work place because of gender politics. GLOW is able to dramatize a stark truth: it doesn’t matter how brilliant, talented, or hard-working a woman is if the gatekeepers to her advancement want to keep her down.

But GLOW is first and foremost a comedy, and it’s worth repeating that the show is somehow funnier this year. There’s a slew of one liners that left me howling. (I actually had to rewind one in the first episode to hear it again.) Alison Brie, Marc Maron, and the rest of the GLOW gang are all great again, but particular note should be taken of Chris Lowell. Last season used Bash as a giddy stereotype of an ’80s Malibu playboy, but Season 2 places him as the secret heart of the team. Bash’s emotional evolution only makes his incessantly funny lines more hilarious, and there’s a turn at the end of the season that forces him to confront the ugliest kind of heartache.

Overall, GLOW Season 2 manages to be as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. One episode that focuses exclusively on the very different lives of two of GLOW‘s biggest stars will rock you with its raw emotion. In fact, one of the storylines made me think of a particularly haunting episode of Showtime’s The Affair. (THE AFFAIR, OF ALL THINGS!) But it’s not just these two characters who find their off-screen personas placed under the microscope. GLOW almost effortlessly folds in some gorgeous bits of character development into its plot without taking its eye off the action.

Once more, the biggest emotional stakes are for Alison Brie’s Ruth and Betty Gilpin‘s Debbie. Brie and Gilpin spent most of Season 1 going toe-to-toe in some scathing one-on-one scenes. If you’ll recall, Ruth has an affair with her best friend Debbie’s husband which made Ruth the “heel” of Debbie’s storyline. But in this season, Ruth has accomplished a sort of redemption for herself, and Debbie is the one who dabbles in the dark side. Since this is GLOW — and because Betty Gilpin is just so good —  Debbie never goes full ’80s villain. Rather, she’s a smoldering ember of a woman who feels the need to stomp on others to cover up her pain. Gilpin and Brie handle these stormier parts of their characters’ relationship with deft performances that somehow manage to be woefully honest and, when they need to be, uproariously funny.

But GLOW Season 2’s biggest triumph might be its playful experiments with story structure. There are a bunch of bottle episodes that riff on a theme, but they all seem to ramp up in the same direction. So that even when we take detours to check in with specific storylines, the new emotional revelations always feed into the overall direction of the season. Because of this, a particularly shocking twist feels all the more powerful because it hits the season right when passions are at their crescendo.

GLOW is the rare delight of a show that is meticulously perfect in every detail, and somehow its whole is greater than the sum of all those perfect parts.

GLOW Season 2 debuts on Netflix on Friday, June 29th. 

Stream GLOW on Netflix