I Saw the TV Glow Cuts Surprisingly Deep

So, I finally watched 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow (now streaming on Netflix UK). I’d wanted to watch it for a while as it’s an A24 horror movie that was heavily influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Count me in! However, I Saw the TV Glow wasn’t what I expected…I don’t think it was what anyone expected!

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, the film takes place in the late 90’s, where a lonely teenager, Owen (Justice Smith), resides in a nameless, endless suburban landscape with his parents. In his aptly named high school, Void High School (VHS), Owen meets a girl named Maddy (Jack Haven credited as Brigette Lundy-Paine). The two bond over the love of a TV show named ‘The Pink Opaque’. As Owen is not allowed to stay up late to watch the show, Maddy invites Owen to a sleepover at her house to watch it, and ultimately provides him with VHS tapes of episodes she has taped off the TV. Their bond strengthens as they realize a cancelled TV show feels more real to them than their fractured lives.

The film is somewhat surreal and is definitely more of a feeling than a plot. Owen wanders around a neon, cool-toned, barren world. Although sweet, Owen is awkward and stilted, at odds with the world around him. I Saw the TV Glow is definitely a film for the outsider.

Schoenbrun states the film is about trans and queer kids discovering their identities. Unlike the Hollywood mainstream version of characters always suspecting that they are trans, I Saw the TV Glow focuses on the unnamed, creeping feeling of the world being wrong, or that you can’t fit into it no matter how hard you try. The character of Maddy announces herself as a lesbian so that Owen doesn’t get any mixed ideas about their sudden friendship. Maddy even asks Owen if he likes girls or boys, and Owen iconically answers: “I think that I like TV Shows,” and isn’t he so real for that?

Particularly in the 90’s and early 00’s, TV shows were very much entwined with teenage identities (we didn’t really have the internet yet). Schoenbrun pays homage to several of the big hitters in the fictional ‘The Pink Opaque’. Shows like: Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Twin Peaks, and particularly Buffy. Obsessive Buffy fans (such as myself) will have recognised the distinctive Buffy font also used for ‘The Pink Opaque’s’ credits. Not to mention the familiar TV formula of ‘monster of the week’ vs ‘The Big Bad’. The film even cast Buffy alumni, Amber Benson, as the mother of an unseen teenage character. Benson looks as beautiful as ever, and fittingly, I’m sure, was responsible for many other teenagers’ queer awakening!

I Saw the TV Glow excellently encapsulates that unspoken attachment to a TV show that it starts to feel more stable and meaningful than your own life. I would never, ever want to take away from anyone else’s story, but Schoenbrun’s movie does speak to anyone who grew up feeling ‘wrong,’ whether that was due to their queerness or even neurodivergence. The recurring scenes of Owen lying prostrate in front of a glowing TV, wearing a blank stare. Many of us will recognize this form of dissociation, a time before smartphones and doom scrolling.

Owen’s journey to establishing his identity or finally discovering what’s ‘wrong’ with him is often jarring, particularly with the gut punch of the final scene. The ending scenes feel uncomfortably familiar, like Owen repeatedly screaming in a room full of people, while no one seems to hear him, and Owen desperately apologizing to his apathetic colleagues for his behaviour.

Many will feel that the movie’s Lynchian-like pacing makes it hard to follow, as the story jumps years, but it illustrates perfectly how quickly time speeds up as we age. Maddy explains how quickly you go from 19 to 20 to 21; “years pass like seconds”. A strangely powerful scene is when, as an adult, Owen struggles to carry his chunky old TV to the curb to be trashed, only to then have a fancy LG flat screen TV delivered. The years race by, our opinions change, our identities shift and reform, but one thing remains the same: we still lie in the ever-present glow of a screen.

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