‘Glamorous’ Review: Kim Cattrall’s Queer Netflix Workplace Dramedy Is a Missed Opportunity
For a show that purports to be all about the importance of being oneself, the frustrating irony of Netflix’s Glamorous is that it doesn’t seem to have any idea what it actually wants to be.
It’s a workplace comedy that has no grasp of how work works, a rom-com that fails to generate a single convincing spark, a Gen Z coming-of-age saga with the cultural references of a geriatric Millennial. What occasional glimmers of potential reveal themselves are buried under tedious writing and nonsensical plot turns. To put it in terms its beauty-biz characters might understand: It’s the TV equivalent of buying a discount eyeshadow palette crammed with two dozen shades, only to realize that maybe three of them actually work on you at all.
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Its protagonist is Marco (Miss Benny), a young queer man who aspires to be a beauty influencer — though with a follower count in the triple digits, he really earns his money working the Glamorous by Madolyn makeup counter at a New Jersey department store. His fortunes change suddenly when Madolyn herself (Kim Cattrall) happens to drop in. One fawning speech later (“This is more than just paint or glitter. It’s therapy in a tube. Magic in a jar. Because it doesn’t just touch your face, it touches you,” he gushes), he’s secured himself an offer to work as her assistant. Marco, Madolyn hopes, will be just what her luxury brand needs to get out of its rut.
It’s a perfectly fine premise, but from the jump, the execution feels off. As played by Miss Benny and written by creator Jordon Nardino, Marco comes off less like a fully realized individual than a collection of TikTok-ready soundbites and catchphrases. (“You’re beautiful. Say it back,” is his cloying sign-off both online and IRL.) What might be cute within the confines of a two-minute makeup tutorial becomes considerably less endearing when stretched out over a ten-hour season that grants Marco plenty of room to make the romantic and professional blunders you’d expect of a 22-year-old, but displays precious little interest in delving deeper into the more complicated facets of his psychology, or in reckoning with the minor messes he leaves in his wake.
Madolyn fares slightly better, as Cattrall’s naturally outsized presence makes it easy to see her as the untouchable glamazon the other characters make her out to be. But Glamorous seems oddly reluctant to portray Madolyn in any remotely negative or teasing light, even as the office around her tips occasionally into satire. It’s as if The Devil Wears Prada were about how Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway were actually super cool people who deserved the undying gratitude and admiration of every single one of their colleagues. At other points, the show brings to mind a less snarky Glee or a less frothy Emily in Paris or a less earnest Love, Victor — which is to say a show that doesn’t really have a distinctive feel at all. Its visuals, meanwhile, are striking in a bad way: Director Todd Strauss-Schulson rivals mid-2010s J.J. Abrams in his love of lens flare.
Still, there are hints scattered throughout Glamorous of the sharper, bolder series it had the potential to be. The series can be funny when it’s poking at the self-absorbed personalities populating the beauty industry, like a social media maven named AlyssaSays (Lisa Gilroy), who, predictably, starts most of her sentences with “Alyssa says.” And it’s most thoughtful when it’s railing against the cynicism of corporate allyship — though the supposedly more meaningful Pride campaign that the Glamorous staff eventually come up with hardly seems like much of an improvement, and though I kept getting distracted by the head-scratching logistics of the whole project. (Does it make sense for a company to still be brainstorming Pride ideas in mid-June? Could a really good Pride campaign singlehandedly turn around the trajectory of a flailing company? Is it actually true that no luxury cosmetics brand ever has so much as tweeted about Pride? Who knows? Not me!)
Some of the supporting cast transcend the flimsy, tell-don’t-show dialogue through the sheer force of their energy. Ayesha Harris and Michael Hsu Rosen share an immediately likable chemistry as Britt and Ben, two product design besties who spend most of their time at work teasing each other about their office crushes. As Marco’s pragmatic mother Julia, Diana Maria Riva provides a welcome counterpoint to the overwrought dramas consuming much of the Glamorous team. Most lovable of all is Chad, Madolyn’s son and the company’s director of sales. Zane Phillips plays him like a golden retriever raised by Cruella De Vil — equal parts conniving and eager to please, with a surprisingly sweet center.
It’s just too bad they’re surrounded by so many undercooked choices. Like the tedious love triangle that arises between Marco, a plainly awful finance bro (Graham Parkhurst), and the hopelessly lovelorn Ben. Or the endless barrage of semi-outdated pop culture references; no one on this show simply fails when they can “flop harder than a Katy Perry single.” Or the assumption that loyalty to one’s job is an unqualified good, to the point that Madolyn’s other assistant (Jade Payton) is painted as selfish for even considering a job interview at another company. “You bail when things get bad,” scolds a love interest who’s been on all of one date with her.
For all of Glamorous‘ flaws, it’s tough to fault the series for wanting to give a queer brown lead the same benefit of the doubt generally afforded to straight cis white ones. Marco talks up the importance of representation more than once, and it’s certainly worth acknowledging that the Marcos of the world deserve space to screw up too — to date the wrong guy, to break the wrong heart, to drop the ball at work, to fall down and get back up and swear to do better next time. But one also hopes for richer, deeper, more complex portrayals of that process than Glamorous, which talks a big game about bravery and ambition but defaults to safe and predictable choices at nearly every turn. In the end, its shallowness dooms Glamorous to forgo the one thing Marco spends the season looking for: an authentic sense of self.
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