What to remember as ‘GLOW’ returns

Published 12:00 am Monday, July 2, 2018

Who’s ready to rumble? Last summer’s Netflix hit “GLOW” returned for a second season Friday, with 10 new episodes that follow the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling in the aftermath of their pilot shoot. The first season didn’t have an especially complicated plot: A ragtag crew of actresses, athletes and dilettantes in 1980s Los Angeles coalesces into a passable all-women’s professional wrestling league, just in time for their colorful personas to face off in the ring. But the show does feature a cast so enormous that you may have forgotten a few faces over the past year.

Before you watch, jog your memory with this cheat sheet on who’s who and where we left the main characters at the end of last season.

Ruth ‘Zoya the Destroya’ Wilder

Season 1 was an emotional whirlwind for the protagonist of “GLOW,” the broke aspiring actress Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie). After years of trying and failing to get work as a serious thespian, she ends up at an audition for GLOW — and she secures the gig only after her best friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), appears at the gym to pound her for sleeping with her husband, Mark (Rich Sommer). As the women’s rivalry rages, Ruth gets an abortion, and the show teases a possible romance between her and the show’s cranky director, Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron). In the finale, she completes her transformation into the cartoonish Soviet heel Zoya the Destroya and proves that she has the vision to bring her fellow wrestlers together.

Debbie ‘Liberty Belle’ Eagan

At the beginning of the Season 1 finale, the future of the league looked uncertain, with Debbie driving off in her station wagon and Ruth reporting sadly that her ex-friend is quitting the show and going home to her husband and baby. A retired soap-opera actress, Debbie knows she’s the star of GLOW, and she loves rubbing Ruth’s face in it. But it turns out that the women have actually declared a truce for long enough to plot a killer surprise: Debbie shows up at the taping and rises from the audience to challenge Zoya. The scheme gives her patriotic heroine character, Liberty Belle, an origin story.

Sam Sylvia

Sam is a mess. A B-movie director with artistic pretensions, he drowns his fears of mediocrity in drugs, alcohol and whichever woman happens to be closest to him. As his and Ruth’s love-hate flirtation simmers, Sam briefly shacks up with the beautiful, flighty wrestler Rhonda Richardson (Kate Nash). Then, he tries to kiss his superfan — and GLOW’s youngest cast member — Justine Biagi (Britt Baron) at a party, only to learn that the girl is actually his high-school-age daughter. This disturbing news touches off a three-day drinking binge that almost causes Sam to miss the entire pilot shoot.

Justine Biagi

Poor Justine. A teenage punk, she traveled all the way from L.A. to Sacramento to meet her father, whom she’d spent years idolizing from afar, only to have the creep make a move on her. After their close call with incest, she flees the shabby motel where the GLOW girls are staying and finds comfort in the arms of her pizza-boy paramour, Billy (Casey Johnson). Her time in the league is over — she was never in it for the wrestling, anyway. But her relationship with her dad may finally be beginning.

Carmen ‘Machu Picchu’ Wade

No character had a more heartwarming arc in Season 1 than Carmen Wade (Britney Young). The daughter of a men’s wrestling legend who considers women wrestlers a joke, she secretly auditions for GLOW using the skills she has picked up at home over the years. Because she is a plus-size woman of color who knows how the sexist, racist wrestling industry works, Carmen assumes she’ll play a villain. But GLOW’s producer, Bash Howard (Chris Lowell), picks up on her sweetness and casts her as the “gentle giant” Machu Picchu.

Sebastian ‘Bash’ Howard

The money behind the GLOW empire, such as it is, comes from Bash. An obsessive wrestling fan and the heir to the Howard Foods fortune, he invests his wealth in an extremely ’80s mansion, a butler and a robot that dispenses drugs. Unfortunately, his reckless spending nearly sinks the show. During the pilot shoot, with Sam nowhere to be found, Bash dons a tuxedo, lovingly smears glitter on his eyelids and steps into his dream role as GLOW’s announcer.

Tammé ‘Welfare Queen’ Dawson

A hardworking mom with a son at Stanford, Tammé Dawson (played by real-life professional wrestler Kia Stevens) struggles with the ethics of wrestling as Welfare Queen, a racist African-American stereotype who flaunts her laziness.

Arthie ‘Beirut the Mad Bomber’ Premkumar

Welfare Queen isn’t the only noxious caricature pushed onto the Gorgeous Ladies. Sam and Bash force the quiet Indian-American student Arthie Premkumar (Sunita Mani) to play Beirut the Mad Bomber, a Lebanese terrorist who growls and ululates.

Cherry ‘Junkchain’ Bang

A veteran stuntwoman who has had trouble getting work since the ’70s heyday of blaxploitation cinema, Cherry Bang (Sydelle Noel) is both a wrestler and the league’s trainer.

Rhonda ‘Britannica’ Richardson

GLOW’s Britannica is “the smartest woman in the world.” The woman behind her, however, is Rhonda Richardson, a British model who’s a bit of a flake. But her heart is in the right place: Sam assumes that she was only sleeping with him to help her career, only to find out after breaking things off that she actually had feelings for him.

Marketplace