Just finished watching GLOW, season 3 on Netflix. In a nutshell, it was an okay season that dealt with some heavy-handed topics, but feels like it’s straying away from everything that made GLOW, GLOW, and that everything in the season was mostly to set up for future seasons of the show.
In some degree, it’s smart that they’ve sowed the seeds necessary in order for them to have future seasons of GLOW, but at the same time, they kind of sacrificed a lot of the present in order to prepare for a future that doesn’t exist yet, as (to my knowledge) there is no future season(s) of GLOW yet ordered. If I’m a betting man, I bet there will be, but frankly in this day and age, it’s hard to ever be certain whenever it comes to the futures of any show, because every show is one actor scandal, writing controversy or some executive going bonkers from getting killed off, regardless of if they’re already nicely wrapped up, or if the plot is as open-ended as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
But still, I had a really hard time getting into this season as I did the previous two, because I think that the plot bounced around a little too much throughout the season. Sure, it’s good to shine the spotlight on all of the girls in various times, but when the day is over, the show really is generally centralized around Sam, Ruth and Debbie. And as potentially interesting the lives of Bash, Rhonda, Carmen, Cherry and the others are, ten episodes just isn’t really enough time to get into everyone, and ultimately, I felt as if the show couldn’t really decide very well which plots to stick with, and was just kind of all over the place.
And for a show that’s technically about women wrestlers, the show strayed pretty far from the wrestling itself and touched on some pretty heavy handed topics, such as homophobia, racial/religious awareness as well as eating disorders. I’m not saying that such things shouldn’t be touched on and fleshed out, because they are most definitely very important things in today’s society, but again, going back to the fact that there were just ten episodes, I don’t think there was simply enough time to really get in on all of them, as well as try and be remotely cohesive to the rest of the show.
Ultimately, maybe it was just not being in the right frame of mind to watch, but I did think it got better as it went on. It was a little slow starting, but did pick up a little momentum along the way. I don’t think it’s the best season of the three, and I still maintain that it felt like they were spending more time planting seeds for the future rather than being in the present, it was still alright, and as I often say when it comes to Alison Brie, it’s very hard to not fall a little bit of in love with her, when she’s on her game, and thankfully the show made sure to give her enough screen time to get in her shining moments.
And hopefully for the writers of S3, there will be a season 4 announced soon, so that the seeds they’ve planted actually have future seasons to grow into. And hopefully then, they won’t spend so much time re-preparing for the future that they won’t be able to shine in the present.
