I Saw the TV Glow

I Saw the TV Glow is a 2024 American psychological horror drama film written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. It stars Justice Smith and Jack Haven as two troubled high school students whose connection to their favorite television show drives them to question their reality and identities. The supporting cast includes Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Ian Foreman, Fred Durst, and Danielle Deadwyler.
Actress Emma Stone and her husband, comedian Dave McCary, are among the film's producers under their Fruit Tree company. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2024. It was given a limited theatrical release by A24 in the United States on May 3, with its theatrical release expanding to Canada and nationwide in the US on May 17. It received positive reviews from critics and five nominations at the 40th Independent Spirit Awards, including Best Feature.
The film marks the second entry in what Schoenbrun refers to as their Screen Trilogy, following the film We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) and preceding an upcoming novel titled Public Access Afterworld.
In 1996, isolated teenagers Owen and Maddy bond over the young adult television show The Pink Opaque, which follows teenagers Isabel and Tara as they use their psychic connection to fight supervillain Mr. Melancholy, who has the power to warp time and reality. Because the show airs past Owen's bedtime, Maddy gives him tapes of the show. Later, Owen sneaks out to Maddy's house to watch it with her. Maddy feels deeply connected to the show, claiming that it feels more real to her than real life.
Two years later, while watching The Pink Opaque with Owen, Maddy begins sobbing inexplicably. She later explains that she has resolved to run away. She expects Owen to join her, but he finds himself unable to go through with it and stays. Later, Owen's mother Brenda dies of cancer; then Maddy goes missing, and The Pink Opaque is canceled after five seasons.
In 2006, Owen still lives with his father Frank and works at a local movie theater. Maddy suddenly reappears one night and takes Owen to a bar where it's "safe" for them to talk. She rebuffs his pleas for her to contact the police, instead questioning what he remembers of The Pink Opaque and claiming to have spent the past eight years inside the show itself. At her urging, Owen rewatches the final episode, in which Mr. Melancholy buries Isabel and Tara alive before imprisoning them in a pocket universe known as the "Midnight Realm". After finishing the episode, Owen suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts to smash his head through the TV screen before Frank pulls him out.
The next night, Maddy explains to Owen that, after running away, she continued to feel unsatisfied, so she paid a man to bury her alive; after suffocating, she awoke in The Pink Opaque as Tara. She explains that they are in fact in the Midnight Realm and that their true identities are that of Tara and Isabel respectively; their memories of their real lives have manifested as episodes of a TV show. Maddy then encourages Owen to allow her to bury him alive so that they may return to their reality. She leads him to a football field to be buried, but he fends her off and rushes home. He never sees her again but remains haunted by her claims.
In 2010, Frank dies of a stroke, and the movie theater Owen works at goes out of business; his boss transfers him to a family entertainment center. One night, he rewatches The Pink Opaque on a streaming service, but finds it to be more fatuous and juvenile than he remembers. Over the next several years, both his depression and asthma increasingly worsen.
In 2026, during a child's birthday party at work, Owen begins screaming that he is dying and begs for help, though nobody reacts. He locks himself in the bathroom and cuts his chest open with a box cutter, smiling when he sees a TV screen playing The Pink Opaque inside. He returns to work and offers timid apologies to partygoers for his outburst.
Appearing as themselves in the film are Phoebe Bridgers, Haley Dahl and their band Sloppy Jane, as well as Kristina Esfandiari and her band King Woman.
Schoenbrun began work on the script for I Saw the TV Glow three months after they had begun undergoing hormone replacement therapy, amid what they described as "overwhelming calamity" following having come out as transgender. In featuring the transgender themes, Schoenbrun deliberately avoided making transitioning or coming out explicitly central to the plot, opting instead to write the story as an allegory so as to distinguish it from other films on the topic.
In 2021, the script caught the attention of Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCary, who Schoenbrun said "fell in love with the script immediately". The script was shopped around to six potential production partners. In October 2021, the film was announced as an A24 production with Schoenbrun directing, while Stone and McCary would produce under their Fruit Tree banner. In August 2022, it was announced Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Helena Howard, Danielle Deadwyler, Amber Benson, Ian Foreman, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Danny Tamberelli, Phoebe Bridgers, Lindsey Jordan, Fred Durst, Haley Dahl, and Kristina Esfandiari had joined the cast.
Principal photography took place in New Jersey from July to August 2022. Shooting took place at Verona High School, Cedar Grove High School, and Keansburg Amusement Park. Other locations were the music venue The Saint and Camp Lewis.
Haven cited I Saw the TV Glow as an allegory for being transgender. Schoenbrun has frequently described the film as being about the "egg crack", a term for the moment in a trans person's life when they realize their identity does not correspond to their assigned gender, and said Owen's choice to not bury himself alive with Maddy and ultimate existential crisis was illustrative of their personal fears of potentially living out their life without having transitioned. In a June 2024 profile of themself published in The New Yorker, Schoenbrun discussed how their relationship with their family had influenced the film's story, saying:
I Saw the TV Glow is heavily influenced by and draws parallels to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), including its use of The Pink Opaque, which features similar elements like strong female leads and a mix of mythic and monster of the week episodes. Owen is introduced to this "Buffy-esque" show that becomes a refuge for him until its narrative starts affecting his reality as the story explores loneliness and the search for something real through a fixation. The cameo by Benson, who played lesbian character Tara Maclay on Buffy, "felt healing in a way" for Schoenbrun, who relied on the show as a coping mechanism during adolescence. The narrative diverges by airing on a children's network and incorporating a magical realism akin to The Adventures of Pete & Pete (1991–1996). Maronna and Tamberelli, lead actors of Pete & Pete, star as ghostly neighbors to explore the uncanny nature of aging. Schoenbrun emphasized that the cameos are not mere Easter eggs but are meant to deepen the film's ideas.
The Pink Opaque continues the Pete & Pete effect by taking up the theme of children living in a "semi-magical, frequently scary" world unnoticed by adults. As the main characters lose or find themselves in the show, Owen's story becomes a demonstration of "what happens to a trans person when the world makes the prospect of transitioning too terrifying to ever look at straight-on". Owen and Maddy represent pre and post-realization stages of identity, mirroring Schoenbrun's own journey of self-discovery. It delves into how people perceive media differently as they grow, with changes in tone reflecting shifts in understanding, and feelings of shame and dysphoria. Owen experiences a sense of claustrophobia and disconnection from reality, mirroring the struggle to retain one's sense of wonder and magic in the face of adulthood. The film ends with Owen when the "world is content to ignore his screams that something inside of him is dying", and highlights the importance of "a little magic, borrowed from art, is one of the only ways to survive, and to remind yourself that—as the film's most haunting line reminds us—there is still time".
The film also draws inspiration from Schoenbrun's recurring dream about the ending of Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and aims to capture a "Lynchian terror". Inspired by its followup Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the film intertwines themes of TV series endings and revivals.
The film's original score was composed by Alex G. The film features an original soundtrack that includes songs from Caroline Polachek, Sloppy Jane, Phoebe Bridgers, Kristina Esfandiari, Florist, yeule, Drab Majesty, Snail Mail, among others. The soundtrack was released on May 10, 2024, followed by Alex G's score, which was released on May 16, 2024.
I Saw the TV Glow premiered in the Midnight section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2024. It also screened at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival in the Panorama section on February 20, 2024, and South by Southwest on March 10, 2024.
The film was released in select theaters in the United States on May 3, 2024 (playing in New York City and Los Angeles), with its release expanding nationwide and to Canada on May 17. It was made available digitally in June 2024. It was theatrically released internationally by Stage 6 Films, including Australia and New Zealand on August 29, 2024, with Park Circus Films codistributing the film in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where it was released on July 26.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 84% based on 228 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "With a distinctive visual aesthetic that enhances its emotionally resonant narrative, I Saw the TV Glow further establishes writer-director Jane Schoenbrun as a rising talent." On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film has a score of 86 out of 100, based on 48 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
To Guy Lodge of Variety, TV Glow is "both promising psychodrama fodder on its own terms, and of a piece with the particular fixations Schoenbrun has established across their small oeuvre thus far". David Ehrlich of IndieWire wrote, "Schoenbrun's astonishing second feature manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale". Some reviewers also praised the film for the authenticity with which it conveyed transgender themes, with Richard Brody of The New Yorker calling it "a profound vision of the trans experience", and Veronica Esposito for The Guardian saying it "speaks to '90s trans teens".
Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times criticized the film as a "collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin", noting that it "invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence". Nicolas Rapold of Sight and Sound agreed, writing that "there's the awed sense of a blueprint or roadmap that is insisted upon without entirely being executed and fulfilled". Dylan Roth of the Observer acknowledged this discomfort, noting that "[his] challenge with I Saw the TV Glow is that almost everything [he] disliked about it is done on purpose, and effectively. As a piece of art, [he] can't deny that it works".
Filmmaker Martin Scorsese praised the film as "emotionally and psychologically powerful" and said that he liked it "a great deal". After viewing the film, Paul Schrader called Schoenbrun "hands down the most original voice in film in the last decade," but "also confounding." Other filmmakers, including Lena Dunham, Drew Hancock and Pascal Plante also praised the film.
Sight and Sound put the film at 11 on their list of the best 50 movies of 2024.
In May 2024, in an interview with USA Today, Schoenbrun stated that a sequel to I Saw the TV Glow was possible, saying that they'd be open to approaching the story from a different perspective. In September 2024, Schoenbrun made a post to X (formerly Twitter), in which they mentioned having an idea for a sequel to I Saw the TV Glow that they want to make "in a few years".