Newsletter | Yes, We All Want The Samantha Jones Spin-Off. No, Glamorous Isn't It

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on July 4, 2023. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

I’M totally convinced that Kim Cattrall’s public relations team gathered at their neighbourhood bar, got sozzled on the company card, and staggered back home after hatching this petty but perfect release strategy for Netflix’s Glamorous. This show came out the same day as the second season of HBO Max’s And Just Like That where Cattrall will be reprising her iconique role as Samantha Jones after refusing to return for the first season. Is this really a coincidence (Ms Jones was a PR maven too)? I’m not greasing any wheels but this controversy certainly captured an eager audience.

Rumours are that Cattrall’s cameo in AJLT is most brief; Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Jones might be together in a single shot but they were never in the same room, or on the set at the same time. Netflix’s Glamorous promises us more than our fill of Cattrall. Can I be ungrateful and send it back though?

Perhaps I should first give you a run-down of the show. Much like campy, colourful comedies such as Ugly Betty and The Bold Type, we enter a workplace through Marco Meijia (Miss Benny), a wannabe makeup influencer, who works at the beauty counter of a department store but wants more from life (of course). Out of the blue, Madolyn Addison (played by Kim Cattrall), a former supermodel and now makeup mogul, shows up at Marco’s counter for a makeover. He impresses her. And just like that she hires him to work for her makeup brand – Glamorous by Madolyn. 

Yes, the company is financially bleeding and needs a quick-fix plan to be turned around and saved. You are right, there are many office romances. Of course, lots and lots of quotable quips. Even some questionable fashion choices for sending around in one’s group chat. There are drag queens! But does any of it make you want to continue watching from episode to episode? In the words of American Idol judge Randy Jackson, “It’s definitely a no for me, dawg!”.

But I did watch all 10 episodes without skipping, and there are a few things that are so perfectly queer that I found myself laughing out loud. American comedian and podcaster Matt Rogers makes a cameo in one episode and his character Tony just says, “Not this” over and over again. He pitches it perfectly in response to everything; it’s so gay to just use a single phrase to express eight million distinct emotions. In the same episode, there are two characters called Jeffrey and Geoffrey who are constantly pressed about their names being correctly pronounced. A group of gays sheltering from a storm get into drag and lipsync to “Cell Block Tango” from Chicago — the musical not the movie, which is definitely the gayer choice.

Even choosing the second on the call sheet after Cattrall, Miss Benny as Marco Meija is so gay. Usually the fancy, femme and flamboyant characters are for the background and the bitchy one-liners but in Glamorous, there is some sort of attempt at filling in the blanks. In this show, the femme character isn’t just the one silently desiring everyone from a dark corner: Marco is desired and wanted too. And we get a rarely-told storyline of femme discrimination within the queer community, where bodies presenting like Marco’s might be desired but only in private, never in public.

So, superficially, Glamorous seems to have everything going for it but there’s just no soul. The acting is terrible — even Cattrall looks like she just rolled her eyes in each scene. Like Marco’s mother says in the show, “Feelings are hard” and Glamorous just can’t seem to do feelings either. There’s no emotional core in any of the scenes – everything happens at the surface level and never ever feels substantial in the show. It just travels from one empty plot point to the next one.

In an interview with The Guardian back in 2019, Cattrall said, she wouldn’t “want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself” and yet she had the gall, guts and gumption to put us through 10 terrible ones. Why, girl, why?

Stream Glamorous.