Summer watchlist: Watch the 25 hottest new shows of the season
By Sundi Rose
Production still from GLOW. Photo: Erica Parise/Netflix
GLOW – June 23
Starring: Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin, and Mark Maron
Premise: The show is fictionalized account of the 1980s phenomenon that was the women’s syndicated wrestling federation. The Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling (GLOW) was a popular wrestling show, and featured a lot of antics and gimmicks, much like their male counterparts.
The show is from Jenji Kohan (Weeds, Orange is the New Black) so you know it’s going to have a healthy balance of absurdity, poignancy, and insane drama. The real life Glow ladies were talented performers who burst into the all-male world of professional wrestling in 1986. The weekly series featured such characters as Brunhilda, Matilda the Hun, Babe the Farmer’s Daughter, and Big Bad Mamma, The show went on for four years and has since garnered an enormous cult following -hence the Netflix series.
For those of you old enough to remember the popular wrestling show, this will be a fun trip down memory lane, however stylized the retelling is. For the younger set, it’s bound to be a fun, pulpy story about female relationships.
The buzz: As with any Netflix show, expectations are pretty high. Factor in Alison Brie, and it’s seems pretty promising. The Hollywood Reporter calls it, “a Cinderella story with a wrestling ring as a chariot.”
Where to watch: Netflix
Production still from Preacher. Photo: Matthias Clamer/AMC
Preacher – June 25
Starring: Dominic Copper, Ruth Negga, Joe Gilgun
Premise: Based on the graphic novel by the same name, Preacher is the story of Jesse Custer. Jesse returns from a lot of hard living to his small Texas hometown to be the preacher of his father’s small church. His ex-partner, Tulip, also returns to rekindle a very dysfunctional relationship with Jesse. Not long after he arrives, he’s possessed by a mysterious force and gets some kind of vague powers that he doesn’t know how to use.
A handful of other kinds of supernatural characters find their way to the town as well, and everything happens in the most surprising and tongue in cheek kind of way. The show holds true to its comic past, but it’s smaller in scope as some of the other shows on the network. It looks beautiful and has a seamless choreography that makes every fight, chase, and explosion look like it’s set to music.
The buzz: Preacher is one of the most underrated shows on right now, especially for an AMC show. It’s brilliant, and critics agree, but it’s having a hard time finding an audience. The Guardian concedes it’s kind of hard to love, mostly because of its attention to detail and scads of secondary characters. However, these are easy to over come. Especially because of its primary players.
"“Dominic Cooper is just the right side of impossibly handsome to pull off a murdering-criminal-turned-preacher; Ruth Negga flits from vulnerable to punch-your-face-off in a flip of the bird; and Joe Gilgun somehow makes Cassidy, the mass-murdering vampire, more darn lovable than a bucket full of puppies and cash."
Where to watch: You can catch up on season 1 on Hulu. Season 2 premieres on AMC.