GLOW Season 3 wastes no time dabbling with tragedy. The season opens zippily enough, re-acquainting us with the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, now bunked up in the Fan-Tan Casino in Las Vegas. It feels like the zany characters we know and love are enjoying some sort of Sin City-themed summer camp experience. They’re rooming together again, trading barbs, and watching their fearless leaders, Ruth (Alison Brie) and Debbie (Betty Gilpin) promote the show on a local newscast. Within minutes though, it’s revealed that Liberty Belle and Zoya the Destroyer are guest commentators for a big moment in American history…the U.S. Challenger launch.

GLOW chooses to handle this infamous tragedy with its trademark sense of humor: it’s bittersweet, awkward, earnest, and yet a tiny bit theatrical. It’s a cold open that sets the tone for an audacious third season for a pitch perfect comedy series. The humor and heart that defines GLOW is still there, but Season 3 finally explores the heartache and trauma that was seething under the surface of the 1980s glitter-soaked attitude of excess. Ruth, Debbie, and the rest of the gang have to finally confront the pain that stalking them like a shadow. Some characters find catharsis in this Season, while others seem to be blindly hurling themselves closer to their own personal tragedies. GLOW is still hilarious, but this season feels more haunted than ever before.

As the end of GLOW Season 2 promised, this new season finds the team in the strange new world of Sin City. After being effectively cheated out of an opportunity to syndicate GLOW, Bash (Chris Lowell), Sam (Marc Maron), and Debbie have decided to accept an offer to present the show as a live theater experience in Las Vegas. There, they have to now answer to entertainment director Sandy Devereaux St. Clair (Geena Davis). Sandy is a showgirl-turned-administrative powerhouse who stands as a sort of relic of Vegas’s lost glory days. Almost every conversation she has lingers on the way things used to be, a sign that she’s grieving an endangered culture on the brink of extinction.

By moving the show to Las Vegas, GLOW is able to depict the poles of decadence and decay. Even as the girls party, Bash showers Rhonda with wealth, and the show itself thrives, you can feel a hangover on the horizon. While this new iteration of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling is a success, that only means that everyone in the cast is forced to push themselves harder physically — and finally GLOW contends with the dark underbelly of wrestling. We see at least one character turn to self-medication to deal with the pain that comes with headlocks and bodyslams. GLOW also illustrates how the mental toll of this work exerts itself upon the cast, leading to a hilarious sequence where the girls exchange characters for a night, and later, a beautifully somber sequence focused on Ruth’s own ennui.

The bigger pain rippling through GLOW’s third season is undoubtedly emotional. Debbie is torn between wanting to relish her life in Vegas, missing her infant son, and feeling completely out of control. Her way of managing this chaos is not healthy, to say the least. Elsewhere, Bash and Rhonda (Kate Nash) are settling into their unconventional marriage. The relationship is sweeter than may have been expected, but Bash’s own personal secret — the truth about his sexuality — threatens to tear them apart, and perhaps lead them to ruin. And stuck together at the Fan-Tan, Sam and Ruth have to wrestle (figuratively) with their own deep-rooted feelings for each other. In fact, almost every one of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling are forced to confront something they’ve been hiding about themselves. These storylines include discussions about racism, ambition, body image, and even motherhood.

The brightest new addition to GLOW has to be Kevin Cahoon’s Bobby Barnes. A cabaret singer at the Fan-Tan, Bobby puts on the guise of a different diva every night, and soon becomes entangled with the cast of GLOW. He represents a tender confidante, a vibrant force of nature, and what some characters fear about themselves. GLOW tussles more directly with the insidious homophobia that gripped ’80s culture and fanned the flames of the AIDS epidemic this season, and the conversations the characters have aren’t always bright and easy.

GLOW‘s third season represents another masterpiece of plotting, character work, and writing from showrunners Liz Flahive, Carly Mensch, and their team. It’s a show that keeps challenging itself to balance light and dark, comedy and tragedy, and truth against imagination. GLOW Season 3 is a tender triumph that uses humor to examine the heartache of America in the 1980s.

GLOW Season 3 premieres on Netflix August 9, 2019.

Watch GLOW on Netflix