I was looking for something easy to watch and Netflix was enthusiastically advertising Glow and… well to be honest I’m not sure what about it made me want to watch. A half hour comedy (rarely my thing), about women’s wrestling (what?) set in the 1980s (ugh). About the only thing it had going for it was Alison Brie who I’ve loved in everything she’s done, not least Community.

I did end up watching the whole series. Not with a huge amount of enthusiasm I confess, it just sort of kept going and I felt it was more effort to chose to not watch the next episode than it was to just finish the season.

The tone of it is rather muddled. I don’t think it was ever quite clear to anyone involved whether they were making a comedy, a drama with black comedy in it, or an out-and-out parody of something ridiculous. There is something inherently ridiculous now about the ’80s – the fashion and the styles, and those are exacerbated by the subject matter. But some of the characters seem to be aware of the extremeness of their costumes etc, while others approach them as completely natural. Similarly plots around sexual harassment, miscarriage and abortion are inconsistently handled with either great tact and care, or completely inappropriate humour that left me close to turning off a couple of times.

There are some threads in there that worked really well and Alison Brie in particular managed to hold things together so she at least felt like she was consistently performing in the same show. But everything else was just too much of a mess to really work.