GLOW is right up there with Mindhunter as perhaps the best Netflix original series to date. And, like Mindhunter, Santa Clarita Diet, Shadow and Bone, Lockwood & Co., Sense8, I Am Not Okay With This, and Tuca & Bertie it was a show that got the ax prematurely. It’s especially strange in the case of GLOW because, one, it was a critical smash, and, two, while Netflix didn’t reveal specific viewership figures back in the day, it was far from being their least popular show. Three, it only had one season to go before it was set to finish. And yet, the Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin-fronted show went away after just three seasons, with each one arguably better than the last.
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Worse yet for GLOW fans, their hopes were raised by Netflix renewing the show for Season 4, one month after the third debuted in August 2019. It seemed to be on its way until October 2020 when the streamer revealed it had been cancelled.
Why Was GLOW Cancelled?
The series, which focuses on fictionalized versions of real-life members of the ’80s syndicated wrestling circuit “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,” was never going to have the macro-scale appeal of a Stranger Things or a House of Cards. But low or dwindling viewership wasn’t the reason the series got the ax.
Instead, it was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected most projects in the entertainment industry, to the point it shuttered quite a few series, Netflix or otherwise. GLOW Season 4 was already in production when this occurred, hence the delay of a year between season renewal and season cancellation. Back in February 2020, lead star Brie posted a set photo to her Instagram account. However, it wasn’t in production long, as the halt occurred just one month later after only one and a half episodes had been completed.
While the primary obstacle to GLOW‘s completion was COVID-19, there was another factor at play as well: cost. Efforts to prevent an outbreak on the set of the wrestling show (which by nature requires much physical contact) would have been expensive, and considering the fact the show was already high cost for a project with a solid but not phenomenal viewership, it just seemed to be too risky a proposition.
Lastly, there was a time gap issue. Netflix felt that a three-year break between the airing of seasons wouldn’t do viewership any favors. GLOW season 3 aired in 2019 and, due to COVID-19, the absolute earliest its final season would have been able to debut would have been 2022. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, leaving fans with a bummer of an unceremonious conclusion.
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Not to mention, the third season had ended on a cliffhanger. “A Very GLOW Christmas” has the women trying to keep their spirits afloat after the ball they were hosting in the previous episode was set on fire by a homophobic gang. One of the wrestlers, Carmen Wade, comes up with the idea of re-enacting A Christmas Carol in the ring. The show is a success and everyone prepares to go to their respective homes for the holidays.
But, in the episode’s (and, by extension, the series’) final moments, Gilpin’s Debbie Eagan approaches Brie’s Ruth Wilder and tells Wilder that she and Chris Lowell’s Sebastian “Bash” Howard intend to keep GLOW going, this time on television. Ruth has been eager to break into acting and directing feature films, so she’s gradually been distancing herself from her friends and colleagues.
Debbie sees this shift for GLOW as an opportunity to bring Ruth back into the fold but, much to Debbie’s dismay, Ruth declines the offer, even when Debbie clarifies she would like for Ruth to direct the GLOW show. Ruth boards her plane to return home and that’s the conclusion.
What Would GLOW Season 4 Have Been About?
So, what would the fourth season have looked like? Not too much is known, unfortunately, though Sam Sylvia’s actor, Marc Maron, has commented that his character and Ruth would have hooked up at some point. Other than that, the best insight comes from Brie’s Q&A with The A.V. Club, where she said “Before we started shooting the fourth season, our showrunners told me the whole story…and I was in tears by the end of their season-long synopsis.”
After briefly recapping Season 3’s final moments, she said Season 4 would open “on Ruth. I think that Ruth was gonna go back to her hometown for a little while as if she was gonna maybe quit wrestling and then get sucked back in… I’ll neither confirm nor deny that that’s the plot of the first episode that we shot that no one will ever see.” It likely would have been a great season of television, and it’s a shame that the time has likely passed for another streamer to pick up the IP for a fitting conclusion.
The seasons of GLOW we did get are now streaming on Netflix.
