There are laughs. There is big hair. There are high-leg leotards. But does Netflix’s 80s-set comedy drama about female fighters end up embodying the rampant sexism and misogyny it seeks to send up?

Over the past couple of years, comedy-drama TV has brought all manner of progressive politics into our living rooms/beds/commutes. From women’s prison drama Orange is the New Black to Transparent, a show that empathetically traces the transgender experience, TV has managed to popularise what were once viewed as marginal issues in a binge-watch-friendly way. Yet by framing themselves (at least partially) as comedies, these shows often prompt the same critique: they just aren’t that funny.

Enter GLOW, the new Netflix series that promises to mix hilarity with right-on commentary on misogyny and race. It’s an enticing prospect – or it would be if the show didn’t turn out to be categorical proof that outrageous comedy and a character-led dissection of oppression are mutually exclusive qualities in TV.

GLOW is a fictional origin story for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, an 80s TV show that capitalised on the success of WWF by presenting breathtakingly stereotypical female fighters – from the terrorism-themed Palestina to cold, cigar-smoking Russian, Colonel Ninotchka – who faux-brawled for the nation’s entertainment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cross between OITNB and DodgeBall … GLOW. Photograph: Erica Parise/Netflix

Our chaperone in this weird world is Ruth, a struggling actor played with a shaggy perm and impressive lack of vanity by Community’s Alison Brie. Broke and desperate for work, she attends a mysterious audition helmed by B-movie director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), which turns out to be for a makeshift all-female wrestling TV show. Once the cast is assembled, the women must adopt a ridiculously reductive persona (the fictional versions include a “welfare queen”, Asian-cliche-wielding Fortune Cookie and “mad bomber” Beirut), learn the wrestling moves and ensure the show makes it on air in the face of funding issues and drug-fuelled benders.

The result is a cross between Orange is the New Black and DodgeBall: an ethnically diverse, Bechdel test-trouncing female ensemble act out a schmaltzy, underdog sports movie dotted with so-wrong-it’s-hilarious humour. It’s not a marriage made in heaven.

Tonally, GLOW is a slippery operator. Revelling in its bad-taste 80s setting – a time when high-leg leotards and casual misogyny were inevitable facts of life – it showcases those outrageous wrestling characters and the similarly outrageous sexism faced by the women playing them with a discombobulating combination of censure and dumb glee.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A slippery operator … GLOW. Photograph: Erica Parise/Netflix

One particularly Frat Pack-esque (and very funny) moment centres on a rehearsal match that pits two black wrestlers against two “members of the KKK”. It’s hilarious, the kind of brainless, impeccably choreographed slapstick that once ruled comedy. GLOW, however, wants to have its cake and eat it with regards to this kind of sick humour, having Sylvia articulate the show’s get-out-of-jail-free sentiment that Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling is about interrogating stereotypes rather than perpetuating them.

Yet switching between cartoonishness and analysis is not easy, and GLOW’s general level of insight is wildly basic – when the Beirut character rouses violent white power-esque hatred in a crowd during a match, Arthie, a woman of Indian heritage who plays her, seems genuinely shocked. Not only is it a bizarrely obvious point (stereotypes fuel racism, who’d’ve thought it), but it creates a strange logic hole in the show, with the women’s motivations for playing up to these cliches especially hard to gauge.

The show’s feminist credentials are just as baffling. GLOW might provide sub-narratives about periods, miscarriage, abortion and post-birth bodies, but there are a lot of tasteless jokes about these things too (mainly delivered by the cranky, coke-encrusted director Sylvia). Are we meant to laugh guiltily when he brainstorms a wrestling match that involves an injury-induced miscarriage? Or feel outrage at his insensitivity? GLOW seems to suggest you do both.

In reality, you can’t – and it’s this contradiction that stops GLOW from succeeding. It doesn’t help that – despite the prevalence of arse-kicking women that deviate from the Hollywood norm – the shows relies on flatpack characters for easy laughs. Brie’s Ruth, a pushy, resolutely unglamorous wannabe actor, may be rounded, but others, such as Kate Nash’s (yes, that one) nice-but-dim British woman act mainly as a walking punchline.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neither funny nor taboo-busting … GLOW. Photograph: Erica Parise/Netflix

Then there are the things that are neither funny nor taboo-busting: the exasperating hashtag-empowerment vibe of the very concept of women’s wrestling (the idea that women doing anything at all = feminism) that is never examined. The fact that the show-within-a-show is masterminded by two men (Sylvia and guileless WASPish producer Bash). That the titillating girl-on-girl action is predicated on catfights – and not just staged ones: the real scrap between Ruth and her ex-best friend is folded into the narrative. And while it claims to challenge the status quo, the lasting taste is one of movie-narrative cliche: with the show adopting the easy messages of chest-puffing nationalism, triumph over adversity and entertainment-by-violence from the wrestling for its own emotional climax.

Admittedly, as alienating as it can be, GLOW does manage to be unusually funny – if also providing an explanation for why shows with something substantial to say about identity politics aren’t laugh-a-minute. If it had only allowed you to turn off the bits of your brain that notice horrendous flaws, perhaps GLOW could have been more open about what it truly is: a problematic riot – but one that’s by no means here to change anything.