Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
STARZ has long been home to original series that revolve around settings rarely seen elsewhere on TV. Sure, there’s the occasional crime procedural — hello, High Town and The Missing — but a STARZ show is more likely to take place in a ballet school, across two parallel universes, in New York City’s nightclub underworld, among bored cater-waiters, or somewhere in the 18th century. Its latest drama carries on this legacy of exploring the obscure: Heels introduces us to the Duffy Wrestling League, a struggling operation in small-town Georgia. But Heels wasn’t the first show to take us behind the scenes of pro wrestling: it was preceded by GLOW, Netflix’s backstage dramedy about women’s pro wrestling — a show that, we were told, could not survive the challenges imposed by filming under COVID protocols and got un-renewed last fall. I’m certainly aware of the many double standards that exist in the patriarchy in which we all reside, but if a show about men’s wrestling can be shot during the pandemic, a show about women’s wrestling should have been, too.
For those who didn’t follow GLOW‘s fortunes as closely as I did, here’s the timeline. GLOW‘s first season premiered in 2017. Shortly after the release of its third, in the summer of 2019, GLOW was renewed for what we were told was a fourth and final season — news that was tragic for fans (me) who felt it could and should have gone on for 30 seasons or more, but comforting in that it at least permitted the show’s creators, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, to wrap up the story on their terms. Production began in February of 2020. The cast and crew completed shooting on the Season 4 premiere. Then filming shut down due to the COVID pandemic. Then Netflix announced that, actually, it wouldn’t be back after all. “We’ve made the difficult decision not to do a fourth season of GLOW due to COVID, which makes shooting this physically intimate show with its large ensemble cast especially challenging,” said an unnamed Netflix spokesperson — possibly anonymous for fear that bitter fans (me) would heckle them in public.
It was a heartbreaking turn of events, but I got it. In October of 2020, no one in the U.S. had yet been vaccinated against COVID. The British panel show Taskmaster was keeping its stars six feet in apart just to sit in a studio; some American late-night hosts were still taping their shows at home. One of Netflix’s biggest original series, The Circle, was a reality competition in which players were each effectively quarantined in their own apartments, without any crew to film them; I could understand that executives’ imaginations failed when it came to the question of how to stage its wrestling matches while keeping the amount of breath and sweat its cast members exchanged to a minimum.
But THEN I HEARD ABOUT HEELS.
…okay, I had probably heard about Heels long before: it started making news as a STARZ series prospect back in 2017, a few months before GLOW premiered. Its premise started to fill out as the network announced its casting: Arrow star Stephen Amell plays Jack Spade, currently playing the villain (aka the heel, in wrestling parlance), in the wrestling league his father founded; Jack also scripts all its matches. Vikings alumnus Alexander Ludwig plays Ace Spade, Jack’s younger brother; a college football washout, Ace is now the league’s newest hero (aka the face), with Jack successfully pumping up their brother vs. brother story to goose ticket sales. But are these actually the right roles for each of the Spades to play? And is Jack too focused on their arc to notice some of his other wrestlers are growing frustrated on the sidelines?
“It must be pretty boring to have a show about wrestling that doesn’t actually include wrestling scenes, though,” you might be thinking — you know, because if that was the reason GLOW couldn’t continue, then surely the same rules apply to Heels. But no, dear reader: the Heels wrestlers definitely wrestle. In the ring, they scream at each other, covertly whisper in each other’s ears, jump on each other, press the entire lengths of their oiled-up bodies together; like GLOW, it is a “physically intimate show” with a “large ensemble cast.” “But maybe they shot it pre-COVID?” Nope! I wasn’t able to determine exactly when production started, but Amell sustained an injury during a wrestling scene in October — just days after Netflix reversed GLOW‘s renewal. STARZ figured out how to do the show safely enough under COVID conditions that, unlike dozens of other shows, it seems never to have shut down production due to a positive COVID test. You’re telling me GLOW couldn’t have been just as conscientious? Does Alison Brie strike you as someone who brings a laissez-faire attitude to the set?! Because that’s not how she strikes me — and she should have been given the opportunity to strike all kinds of people in THE FOURTH SEASON GLOW SHOULD HAVE HAD.
And look: Heels is not a bad show. I raced through the four screener episodes critics were provided and intend to watch all eight of the season’s episodes. Amell and Ludwig have compelling brother chemistry, and Chris Bauer — as Wild Bill Hancock, former heel to their late dad’s face, who was recruited from the DWL to wrestling fame on a national scale — is particularly great as an unapologetic jackass. But as the ponderous theme song and flickering credits sequence warn the viewer, this isn’t a show that’s trying to be a lot fun. It’s striving to remind you of Friday Night Lights (even though, inasmuch it concerns characters in a dying Southern town whose physical mastery is under-appreciated because even its fans think it’s fake, it has much more in common with another STARZ show: P-Valley), and its portrayal of adult men not quite dealing with their trauma regarding their dead father is well-trod pop-cultural ground. What made GLOW so surprising, so bracing, and so special is that it was about women finding their professional identities — and true sisterhood with one another — in what is traditionally a male pursuit. Seeing men in what is traditionally a male pursuit is…fine? But it doesn’t hit the same way.
GLOW was — despite how much I loved it — not a perfect show, and its producers had blind spots, particularly regarding race, which several of its cast members of color successfully challenged them to address in the fourth season we will never see. The marginalization of the DWL’s non-white performers is already a storyline in the first half of Heels‘s début season, suggesting that even if GLOW didn’t get a chance to learn from Heels on the matter of COVID protocols, Heels may have had the chance to learn from GLOW on its portrayal of racial issues.
I’m an adult and I understand how these things work. I know that if GLOW were a bigger hit, Netflix would have found a way to make the COVID math work and complete the fourth season we were promised. I also know it’s easier, in the main, to sell female viewers on a show about men than to sell male viewers on a show about women. And I know that Heels and GLOW were never really in competition. But when two such similar shows have such different pandemic trajectories, it’s hard not to compare and contrast. GLOW won three Emmys from its 18 nominations; Heels has a series creator, Michael Waldron, who’s now a big shot in the Marvel universe, as the showrunner on Loki and writer on the next Doctor Strange movie. Prestige is nice, but it’s no match for a built-in nerd audience. I’m not actually mad at Heels, but I will probably be mad about GLOW for the rest of my life, and I wish we lived in a world where both were possible, instead of this multiverse of madness.
Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano was the co-founder of Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), and the co-author with Sarah D. Bunting of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She has also contributed to New York, the New YorkTimes Magazine, Collider, Vanity Fair, Slate, Mel Magazine, Vulture, Salon, and The Awl, among many others. She lives in Austin.
