GLOW Season 3 Will Deliver The GLOW Fans Know

Warning: SPOILERS ahead for GLOW Season 2

In GLOW season 2, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling must wrestle their hearts out and put on an unforgettable show to keep from being canceled. This leads to a set up for season 3 that will spark excitement for longtime fans of the original GLOW from the 1980s. In short, the GLOW girls are headed to Las Vegas - the birthplace and home base of the real-life GLOW!

Netflix's hit series picks up from where season 1 left off: after a short hiatus, the ragtag troupe of pro wrestlers come back for a new season and are urged to become better in the ring. They put their bodies on the line to improve the quality of their matches, only to learn that their series is in on the verge of cancelation. Meanwhile, the GLOW girls themselves deal with various personal issues - especially the two stars of the series, Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie) and Debbie Egan (Betty Gilpin), whose volatile friendship comes to a head violently in the ring.

In the end, season 2 introduced a huge change to GLOW and to the lives of their heroic group of performers and producers. Here's how GLOW season 2 upended the show to bring the series to Las Vegas in season 3:

This Page: How Season 2 Sets Up Season 3
Page 2: Las Vegas is Where GLOW Belongs

HOW GLOW SEASON 2 SETS UP SEASON 3

Upon returning from hiatus and trying to raise their game to put on more believable wrestling matches, the GLOW girls suffer a huge setback. The show's sponsor, Patio Town, pulls their support because Debbie/Liberty Belle broke their patio furniture in her championship rematch with Tammé/Welfare Queen (Kia Stevens). Even more damaging, despite their small but loyal fanbase of regulars who attend their TV tapings, KD-TV, the local network that owns the series, relegated GLOW to 2 am on Saturday nights - a timeslot that means certain death. GLOW's solution is to work harder and put on even zanier shows, but their efforts to boost ratings were in vain.

Bash (Chris Lowell), GLOW's enthusiastic millionaire backer, and Debbie, now a producer, try to finagle new sponsorships to take GLOW national through syndication. But it was Sam (Marc Maron), GLOW's acerbic director, who inadvertently made the pivotal contact that saved his show: while he and Ruth chaperoned the school dance of his daughter Justine (Britt Baron), Sam met Ray (Horatio Sanz), the owner of a chain of local strip clubs. Ray accepted Sam's invitation to watch the GLOW series finale, which featured the real-life wedding of Rhonda/Brittania (Kate Nash), who needed to actually marry an American to get a green card and not be sent back home to the UK. Bash and Debbie invited potential new sponsors to the show as well, but they were all shocked to learn that because of the contracts they signed, KD-TV owns the rights to all of their characters and prevented them from selling GLOW to another network. GLOW as a TV series is over.

However, Ray loved the show and saved GLOW. Instead of a TV series, Ray offered them a slot at one of his clubs in Las Vegas, which needed a live headlining act - something he felt GLOW would be perfect for. Instead of the ratty warehouse that they remodeled to look like the ballroom of a fancy hotel, GLOW will now present their show in a huge space with room for 1,100 screaming fans, and they would earn $25,000 as Vegas headliners. GLOW may no longer be a TV series, but they're moving on up. What's more, the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Vegas is where the 1980s GLOW was filmed, so it means Netflix's GLOW is 'coming home' in season 3.

Page 2: Las Vegas is Where GLOW Belongs

Kate Nash Jackie Tohn Betty Gilpin in GLOW season 2

SEASON 2 SHOWS THE GLOW FANS REMEMBER

Netflix's GLOW always had impressive verisimilitude. From the costumes, hair, makeup, sets, and music, GLOW vividly recreated the series' 1985 setting. Part of the fun of season 1, which leaned heavily on real-life wrestling cameos to give the Netflix show an air of authenticity (or 'the rub' as its called in pro-wrestling-speak), was how closely they came to replicating the classic GLOW TV series. Season 2 pushes everything even farther and the 8th episode, "The Good Twin", is a stunning show-within-the-show that presents fans with what a complete episode of GLOW looked like if you turned in to KD-TV on Saturday night at 2 am.

When Debbie/Liberty Belle wrestled Ruth/Zoya, she let her animosity towards her best frenemy overwhelm her and she broke Ruth's ankle for real during their match. Ruth's hospitalization rallied all of the GLOW girls, Sam, and Bash together. When Ruth was released from the hospital and was forced to spend the next 10 weeks on crutches, Sam decided to lean on her for her creativity (after angrily rejecting how she directed a new intro for the show at the start of the season). Knowing that GLOW was about to be canceled anyway, they decided to go all-out and put on the craziest shows they could.

This resulted in what fans were treated to in "The Good Twin": 30 minutes of sheer insanity with ridiculously campy sketches occasionally interrupted by hilariously bad wrestling matches. The centerpiece storyline was Ruth portraying Zoya's 'good twin sister' Olga, who has a 'deformed foot' to explain away Ruth's cast and crutches. Olga decided to help Liberty Belle find her daughter, whom Zoya kidnapped and is keeping a prisoner in 'a mountain fortress', a.k.a. the Griffith Observatory. In another sketch parodying Frankenstein, Brittania tries to give life to a mannequin because she needs a boyfriend, which Cherry/Black Magic (Sydelle Noel) does for her in exchange for her brain. Sheila the She-Wolf (Gayle Rankin) then gets romantic with the goat Olga brought to America from Russia. Meanwhile, the rest of the GLOW girls hilariously sing an ode to why "kidnapping is wrong to do." The entire episode is a brilliant parody and tribute to the zany sketches of the classic GLOW.

SEASON 3 IN LAS VEGAS IS WHERE GLOW BELONGS

As close as GLOW has come to recreating the look and feel of the original, the fact that the Netflix series was based in Los Angeles was always a sticking point. The original GLOW was always a Las Vegas operation, with the cast actually living in the Riviera Hotel on the Strip when they weren't filming the show from the casino's ballroom. The season 3 move to Vegas feels right, not just for the series itself but also for the characters. For instance, Debbie reluctantly gets to leave the baggage of her messy divorce to Mark (Rich Sommer) behind, while Ruth also faces an exciting but uncertain future both as a wrestler and as a trusted creative force besides Sam. It's the fresh start GLOW needed after 2 seasons of struggling.

Moving to Las Vegas not only brings Netflix's series closer-than-ever to the original, it also represents a necessary shift in GLOW's visual palette. The first two seasons were about people who were down-and-out trying to make the most of this bizarre chance they were given and the visuals matched this no-budget style. Season 3 is the promotion they fought for: with a bigger venue and more resources to play with, GLOW gets to become bigger, glitzier, and even more outrageous in the anything-goes environment of 1980s Las Vegas. It's still not going to be a perfect recreation since GLOW in season 3 will not be a TV series but a live floor show, but perhaps GLOW in Vegas will be such as success that they will end up securing the national TV syndication they wanted (and the real GLOW had).

The original GLOW was founded by a babyfaced, tuxedoed showman named David McLane, whom the character Bash Howard is based on. Chris Lowell even does an uncanny impression of McLane's bombastic announcing style. Something true fans of the 1980s classic are hoping to see is one of that show's goofy trademarks: David McLane's 'office' is a phone booth on the Las Vegas Strip where he tries to make big deals for GLOW via pay phone. Hopefully, GLOW season 3 will give Bash an identical phone booth 'office' while the GLOW girls perform a new rap all over Las Vegas' fancy casinos.