‘GLOW’ Star & Showrunners Take Us Inside Season Two’s Harrowing #MeToo Moment

When news broke last fall that Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed and assaulted legions of women, a cultural revolution of sorts started to take shape. Soon, an avalanche of allegations about other media titans came into the light, and society had to cope with the reality that sexual harassment and assault were a behind-the-scenes epidemic in show business. Since then, many artists have had to grapple with what this means in awkward interviews, profound public statements, and in their art itself. And Netflix‘s GLOW was uniquely situated to tackle the issue head on.

The second season of GLOW follows the struggles of producing an all-women’s wresting show in the middle of the debauched 1980s. Protagonists Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie) and Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin) both find themselves blossoming on the show’s set, and chafing under the harsh reality of sexism. Ruth is a born director whose ideas are discounted because she’s a woman, and Debbie is a cunning businesswoman who is also consistently shuffled out of important conversations.

However, when a business meeting for Ruth goes awry — the network head lures her to dinner under the pretense of a discussion about her acting, only to pressure her into sex — the show addresses the #MeToo movement head-on, and with heavily nuanced shades of grey. When Ruth confides in Debbie about the situation, Debbie blames Ruth for not going along with the seduction, at one point arguing that “feminism has principles, life has compromises.”

It’s a shocking moment that outlines many of the institutional and cultural reasons why so many women were pressured to stay silent about their traumatic experiences. When Decider sat down with GLOW showrunners Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch and star Betty Gilpin at Summer 2018 TCA, we asked all three what the scene meant to them.

Betty Gilpin said, “When I first read the scene, I was really disappointed in Debbie and mad at her, but I took a step back and reminded myself that that conversation between two women is difficult and complicated now, and was probably all the more difficult and complicated in 1985.”

“I think that while Debbie has pretty high self confidence, her self worth is not in the best place, and I think Ruth has more self worth than Debbie has. And I think that when Debbie heard that Ruth was in a situation that Debbie has probably been in many times and maybe made a different choice than Debbie had, it was all Debbie’s own shame coming up. She did not want that mirror in that moment, so she lashes out at Ruth to try and feel less small and sad than she does in that moment,” Gilpin said. “I mean, that’s what I thought was going on.”

Carly Mensch pointed out that the episode was written “beautifully” by Rachel Shukert, and that “we never intended that scene to be Ruth is right, Debbie is wrong. We intended it to be two women who have had very different experiences in the industry.”

Mensch said, “I think that line — ‘The one time you keep your legs shut we all get fucked’ — is a very telling line of where Debbie is coming from and how this fight is also about other things that maybe bubble up, that we had been planting.”

Liz Flahive concurred and said that they didn’t want to have “a conversation that felt black and white.”

“We are not getting on a soapbox,” Flahive said. “We are interested in a conversation between two characters you care about and you understand parts of their relationship and how complicated it is. It just hits you in a different way because you care about both those women and they are both coming from different places so I think you’re allowed to have just a messy, human conversation about something. And I think right now we are having conversations that are messy and some that are black and white.”

Mensch also pointed out that Debbie makes a few honest points. “Like the fact that Ruth is taking an entire team down with her, is still true even if it shouldn’t be that way. These are not untrue things,” Mensch said, explaining the goal was to make it, as Flahive said, “as messy and personal as possible.”

Flahive and Mensch also revealed that the Weinstein bombshells dropped in between the time the script had been outlined and when they finally wrote and shot the scene. While they had already planned that a network head would proposition Ruth, the allegations surrounding Harvey Weinstein changed at least one major detail in the scene.

“We moved to the location to a hotel room after Harvey Weinstein, but we had the story fully boarded before Weinstein,” said Mensch.

Stream GLOW on Netflix