What to Remember Before ‘GLOW’ Comes Back for Season 2

Who’s ready to rumble? Last summer’s Netflix hit “GLOW” will return for a second season Friday, with 10 new episodes that follow the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling in the aftermath of their pilot shoot. The first season didn’t have an especially complicated plot: A ragtag crew of actresses, athletes and dilettantes in 1980s Los Angeles coalesces into a passable all-women’s professional wrestling league, just in time for their colorful personas to face off in the ring. But the show does feature a cast so enormous that you may have forgotten a few faces over the past year.

Before you watch, jog your memory with this cheat sheet on who’s who and where we left each character at the end of last season.

Season 1 was an emotional whirlwind for the protagonist of “GLOW,” the broke aspiring actress Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie). After years of trying and failing to get work as a serious thespian, she ends up at an audition for GLOW — and she secures the gig only after her best friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), appears at the gym to pound her for sleeping with her husband, Mark (Rich Sommer). As the women’s rivalry rages, Ruth gets an abortion, and the show teases a possible romance between her and the show’s cranky director, Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron). In the finale, she completes her transformation into the cartoonish Soviet heel Zoya the Destroya and proves that she has the vision to bring her fellow wrestlers together. She is even on her way to patching things up with Debbie, although the healing process isn’t quite over. “You want to grab a drink?” Ruth asks when the pilot shoot wraps. “No,” Debbie replies. “We’re not there yet.”

At the beginning of the Season 1 finale, the future of the league looked uncertain, with Debbie driving off in her station wagon and Ruth reporting sadly that her ex-friend is quitting the show and going home to her husband and baby. A retired soap-opera actress, Debbie knows she’s the star of GLOW, and she loves rubbing Ruth’s face in it. But it turns out that the women have actually declared a truce for long enough to plot a killer surprise: Debbie shows up at the taping and rises from the audience to challenge Zoya. The scheme gives her patriotic heroine character, Liberty Belle, an origin story. It also further alienates Debbie from Mark, who dismisses GLOW as “silly.”

Sam is a mess. A B-movie director with artistic pretensions, he drowns his fears of mediocrity in drugs, alcohol and whichever woman happens to be closest to him. As his and Ruth’s love-hate flirtation simmers, Sam briefly shacks up with the beautiful, flighty wrestler Rhonda Richardson (Kate Nash). Then, he tries to kiss his superfan — and GLOW’s youngest cast member — Justine Biagi (Britt Baron) at a party, only to learn that the girl is actually his high-school-age daughter. This disturbing news touches off a three-day drinking binge that almost causes Sam to miss the entire pilot shoot. In the end, though, he arrives in time to put his own spin on the match and start making amends with Justine.

Poor Justine. A teenage punk, she traveled all the way from LA to Sacramento to meet her father, whom she’d spent years idolizing from afar, only to have the creep make a move on her. After their close call with incest, she flees the shabby motel where the GLOW girls are staying and finds comfort in the arms of her pizza-boy paramour, Billy (Casey Johnson). Her time in the league is over — she was never in it for the wrestling, anyway. But her relationship with her dad may finally be beginning.

No character had a more heartwarming arc in Season 1 than Carmen Wade (Britney Young). The daughter of a men’s wrestling legend who considers women wrestlers a joke, she secretly auditions for GLOW using the skills she has picked up at home over the years. Because she is a plus-size woman of color who knows how the sexist, racist wrestling industry works, Carmen assumes she’ll play a villain. But GLOW’s producer, Bash Howard (Chris Lowell), picks up on her sweetness and casts her as the “gentle giant” Machu Picchu. In the finale, she conquers her stage fright, wins her match and basks in the love of a crowd that includes her proud father.

The money behind the GLOW empire, such as it is, comes from Bash. An obsessive wrestling fan and the heir to the Howard Foods fortune, he invests his wealth in an extremely ‘80s mansion, a butler and a robot that dispenses drugs. Unfortunately, his reckless spending nearly sinks the show. During the pilot shoot, with Sam nowhere to be found, Bash dons a tuxedo, lovingly smears glitter on his eyelids and steps into his dream role as GLOW’s announcer.

A hardworking mom with a son at Stanford, Tammé Dawson (played by real-life professional wrestler Kia Stevens) struggles with the ethics of wrestling as Welfare Queen, a racist African-American stereotype who flaunts her laziness. When she takes her concerns to Sam, he works up a final twist to GLOW’s first match: After Liberty Belle defeats Zoya, Welfare Queen hops onstage and steals her crown. “America, you have turned your back on me long enough!” she shouts. “You’ve ghettoized my people, trapped us in an endless cycle of poverty.”

Welfare Queen isn’t the only noxious caricature pushed onto the Gorgeous Ladies. Sam and Bash force the quiet Indian-American student Arthie Premkumar (Sunita Mani) to play Beirut the Mad Bomber, a Lebanese terrorist who growls and ululates. Her discomfort with the role peaks in the finale, when she wrestles for the first time and the audience hurls slurs — and a beer can — at her.

A veteran stuntwoman who has had trouble getting work since the ‘70s heyday of blaxploitation cinema, Cherry Bang (Sydelle Noel) is both a wrestler and the league’s trainer. Her frustrating back story also includes a crushing miscarriage and a short-lived fling with Sam, but her kind, supportive marriage to another actor, Keith Bang (Bashir Salahuddin), keeps her from giving up. In the finale, she is offered a lead role on a detective show and must decide whether to leave GLOW.

Sheila the She-Wolf (Gayle Rankin) is the same person inside and outside the ring — and that person happens to identify as a wolf. One illuminating episode from Season 1 begins by revealing Sheila’s unorthodox morning routine: She paints her perfect teeth yellow and covers her neat, blonde hair with a long, ratty, black wig. Initially standoffish, she starts to bond with the other wrestlers when Ruth throws a roller-skating party for Sheila’s birthday.

GLOW’s Britannica is “the smartest woman in the world.” The woman behind her, however, is Rhonda Richardson, a British model who’s a bit of a flake. But her heart is in the right place: Sam assumes that she was only sleeping with him to help her career, only to find out after breaking things off that she actually had feelings for him.

Melanie Rosen (Jackie Tohn) is a Sunset Strip party girl, just like her GLOW alter ego, Melrose. She’s a prankster, a hedonist and a spoiled brat — all of which puts her at odds with the hardworking, no-nonsense Cherry. In the finale, Melrose enters the ring on the shoulders of two shirtless bellboys.

Jenny Chey (Ellen Wong) is Cambodian-American, and fortune cookies were invented in America, but that doesn’t stop her from getting cast as a Chinese heel named Fortune Cookie. Although “GLOW” hasn’t revealed much about her personal life, her and Ruth’s Communist tag-team shtick was a highlight of the league’s first live event.

An actual Olympic medalist, Reggie Walsh (Marianna Palka) dreams up the role of Liberty Belle for herself. Unfortunately for her, Debbie is hotter, blonder and more feminine. Reggie ends up playing a half-baked viking villain. In a final indignity, her match with Junkchain is interrupted when Cherry pauses to tell Keith, who happens to be the referee, about her new job offer.

Stacey Beswick (Kimmy Gatewood) and Dawn Rivecca (Rebekka Johnson) are hairdressers whose goofy banter inspires Sam to cast them as the elderly, walker-wielding Beatdown Biddies. Don’t worry if you can’t remember much more about them; neither character has really stepped into the spotlight yet.