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Netflix Orders Women’s Wrestling Comedy ‘GLOW’ From ‘OITNB’ Creator

By Ny MaGee
Published on: 12:23 PST, May 31, 2016

Orange Is the New Black creator and executive producer Jenji Kohan has scored a 10-episode series order from Netflix for a scripted comedy based on the ’80s all-female wrestlers of G.L.O.W. The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW or G.L.O.W.) launched in 1986 as a professional wrestling league for sexy women who donned colorful outfits and adopted fearless and oftentimes outrageous personas. Most of the GLOW performers were actresses, models, and stunt women hoping to break into showbiz through wrestling. The organization transitioned into an unscripted syndicated series that filmed at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas and ran for four years in the late ’80s. Each of the GLOW performers had her own rap song. For a taste of their hip hop skills, check out the clip below.

The GLOW series integrated cheesy comedy sketches, songs, and wrestling. E! News confirms that the Netflix scripted series will be set in Los Angeles and celebrates “big hair and body slams.” The show will tell a “fictionalized story of an out-of-work actress who finds one last attempt to live her dreams in the form of a weekly series about female wrestlers.”

Sylvester Stallone’s mom, Jackie Stallone, founded GLOW with David McLane, and the organization transferred ownership in 2001 to Ursula Hayden. The Netflix series was co-created by Liz Flahive (Homeland) and Carly Mensch (OITNB), who previously worked together on Nurse Jackie. Both will serve as showrunners and executive producers alongside Kohan and fellow OITNB vet Tara Herrmann.

A documentary film entitled GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling was completed in late 2011, and received positive reviews. The doc has been featured in numerous magazines and publications, including New York Magazine, LA Weekly, the Roger Ebert website, and The Village Voice. It won the Best Documentary award at Comic-Con International Film Festival in San Diego, CA, and the Audience Choice Best Documentary at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, AL.

In addition to Orange is the New Black, Jenji Kohan is best known as the creator of the Showtime comedy-drama series Weeds. She has received nine Emmy Award nominations, winning one as supervising producer of the comedy series Tracey Takes On…. OITNB was inspired by Piper Kerman’s memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison about her experiences in a minimum-security women’s prison.

Vanity Fair profiled Kohan last year with a piece that notes, “As a show-runner, she actively seeks out faces that don’t conform to ‘the blandness and sameness of the TV landscape over the past few decades.’ Jenji is also quoted as saying that she has a “deep-rooted ‘f*** you’ nature.”

Netflix has over 81 million subscribers worldwide, including more than 46 million in the U.S., and serves over 190 countries. The company began acquiring and producing original content in 2011, starting with the political drama House of Cards. Since then, Netflix has produced hundreds of hours of original content for global markets, including shows such as a revamp of the Fox comedy Arrested Development, Lilyhammer, Hemlock Grove, and Sense8, and in 2013, Netflix and Marvel Television inked a five-season deal to produce live action series based on four superheroes: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage. Disney also released the sixth and final season of the TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars exclusively on Netflix.

Netflix’s newly announced original series GLOW will be a half-hour weekly program overseen by the streaming service, unlike OITNB, which is handled by Lionsgate. No premiere date for the G.L.O.W series has been announced yet. In the meantime, check out the vintage footage of the female wrestlers below.


[Photo via Shutterstock]

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