Netflix Cancel GLOW’s Fourth And Final Season

Netflix’s period drama GLOW – or to give it its full name, Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, has confirmed it will not finish production on what was to be its fourth and final season after the show’s renewal in August 2019.

 

The Cast React

The stars of the show have responded with dismay in much the same way you might expect their characters to do, with Alison Brie taking to Instagram to post a tribute to her castmates:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CF-vuOeHcxm/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading

While Marc Maron broke the news in a curt, slightly bitter manner on Twitter:

No more GLOW. Sorry. Stinks.

— marc maron (@marcmaron) October 5, 2020

But why’d this happen?

Rather than this being the traditional Netflix curse of ‘three seasons, that’s your lot’, this is quite explicitly due to the increased cost and difficulty of filming a physically intensive show under Coronavirus safety regulations. In a statement made to Deadline, series creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch said “COVID has killed actual humans. It’s a national tragedy and should be our focus. COVID also apparently took down our show”, adding “We’ll miss our cast of weirdo clowns and our heroic crew. It was the best job.”

GLOW had been three weeks into the filming of its fourth season when production was suspended in mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic. And GLOW, more than most shows, would have run up against the safety measures employed by the industry – partially because of the simple physicality involved in wrestling, even if that had become a smaller part of the story, and partially because of its relatively large central cast of around 20. Per Netflix, this inflated the budget further than they would have liked, and the earliest the fourth season would have made it to air would have been at some point in 2022.

 

#saveglow

Cutting the show off just before its natural end has, inevitably, infuriated the fanbase – and, sure enough, the hashtag #saveglow is already going strong on Twitter. This is not least because the third season was noticeably building to something, or at the very least less open-ended than the first two, ending on the oddly rom-com note of Betty Gilpin’s Debbie literally chasing Alison Brie’s Ruth through an airport before begging her not to leave. It was on this ship-baiting moment that Netflix chose to put a pin in it. You can understand people being frustrated.