In the 1980s, the Worldwide Wrestling Federation dominated airwaves and lunchboxes with caricatures and over-the-top theatrics. How could anyone hoping to compete in the ring of televised wrestling heighten the camp? By creating an all-female league that rapped. From 1986 to 1990, G.L.O.W., i.e. the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, delivered a dizzying combination of sex, violence, and comedy into American living rooms. Women with loud makeup and big hair tossed each other around, grunting and sweating in skimpy leotards. It aired on Saturday mornings.

“Empowerment versus exploitation: they were both there. That’s what makes it interesting,” says Liz Flahive. She and Carly Mensch are the co-creators and co-executive producers of GLOW, a Netflix series premiering June 23 that is inspired by the 80s phenomenon. It’s also executive produced by Orange Is the New Black maestro Jenji Kohan.

Flahive and Mensch are young (and lucky) enough to have worked only on series helmed solely or in part by women. They met as playwrights at the Ars Nova theater in New York and were staff writers together on Nurse Jackie, and have both put in time on other Kohan series as well. They developed the wrestling dramedy after watching the 2012 documentary GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and then going “down a rabbit hole,” as Flahive puts it, of old episodes. The result is a fictionalized making-of story. Alison Brie (Mad Men) and Betty Gilpin (American Gods) lead an ensemble cast as desperate actors who sign on to a dubious cable project along with a motley crew of outcasts.

Members of G.L.O.W. wrestle in the ring on May 4, 1988 in Los Angeles. By Laura Luongo/Liaison/Getty Images.

Watching the ‘80s franchise, Mensch recalls responding to “this idea of a sisterhood of misfits going through something that they have never experienced before.” The original G.L.O.W. ladies were mostly actresses who had to learn how to wrestle—which is exactly what Flahive and Mensch asked of their cast. The women worked with trainers for weeks before shooting commenced. Doubles were rarely used; Brie did all of her own stunts. “They became incredibly close during training,” Flahive explains. “It was this great equalizer because they were all vulnerable, taking physical risks, and putting their safety in each other’s hands. That was before they even got a script.”

Similarly, the first few episodes of the new G.L.O.W. portray the characters learning to wrestle—which was important to Flahive and Mensch, since the ring personas their characters later inhabit are, depending on your persuasion, offensive, comedic, or generally confusing. But they’re also true to life: the 80s G.L.O.W. capitalized on every low-hanging cultural stereotype. In a grainy vintage clip available on YouTube, a character named Palestina, whose dress is terrorist-reminiscent, runs a finger across her neck while saying in a thick accent that she is “not afraid to kill.” Actually, she raps—and then the next wrestler raps, “I’m Spanish Red and I love tequila/When my blood gets hot, I’m even meaner.”