What’s on TV Friday: ‘GLOW’ and Earth, Wind & Fire on ‘CMT Crossroads’

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Alison Brie plays a flailing actress turned professional wrestler in “GLOW,” with Jenji Kohan of “Orange Is the New Black” as an executive producer. And Earth, Wind & Fire adds a country twang in “CMT Crossroads.”

What’s Streaming

GLOW on Netflix. Alison Brie stars as Ruth Wilder, the kind of classically trained actress that casting directors send to calls asking for “real people,” who can’t land a job in 1980s Los Angeles. Then she answers an ad looking for unconventional women to play wrestlers on a low-budget TV show helmed by Sam (Marc Maron), a schlocky sci-fi movie director, who has been hired by a moneyed young man (Chris Lowell) to create the kind of art his mother doesn’t approve of. But wrestling isn’t Ruth’s sport — until her best friend, Debbie (Betty Gilpin), a soap actress whose husband (Rich Sommer) Ruth has been sleeping with, shows up at rehearsal and attacks Ruth in the ring. And suddenly Sam’s show has both a hero and a villain. Jenji Kohan of “Orange Is the New Black” is an executive producer on this ensemble comedy, created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch and inspired by the real-life Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Writing in The New York Times, James Poniewozik called “GLOW” “a high-flying leap off the top rope, a summer treat with spandex armor and a pulsating neon heart.”

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A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM (2013) on FilmStruck. Starting with the view seen by Vincent van Gogh from a sanitarium in St. Rémy, France, the filmmaker Mark Cousins, inspired by his niece and nephew at play, uses 53 films from 25 countries to explore the depiction of childhood adventures onscreen and the young actors who recreate youthful expressions. The works range from the well known, like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Fanny and Alexander,” “The Red Balloon” and “The 400 Blows,” to the not so familiar, including “Finlandia,” “Children in the Wind,” “Palle Alone in the World” and “Ten Minutes Older.”

What’s on TV

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CMT CROSSROADS: EARTH, WIND & FIRE AND FRIENDS 10 p.m. on CMT. The band goes a little bit country in Nashville in renditions of its hits — among them, “Shining Star,” “After the Love Has Gone” and “September” — with Lady Antebellum, Darius Rucker, Rascal Flatts, Martina McBride, Dan and Shay, Sara Evans and Drake White.

20/20 10 p.m. on ABC. This newsmagazine investigates the death of Otto Warmbier, the American student who in March 2016 was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea for committing a hostile act against the state after trying to steal a propaganda poster. On June 13, Mr. Warmbier was returned to the United States in a coma. He died on Monday; the cause of his medical condition and the details of his imprisonment are still unknown.

DATELINE NBC 10 p.m. on NBC. Josh Mankiewicz reports on the 2012 shooting death of Heidy Truman, and the events that led to the conviction of her husband, Conrad, for first-degree murder two years later — and the appeal that followed.

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