‘I Saw the TV Glow’ May Be the Most Complicated, Fascinating Movie about TV Fandom Ever Made

A lot of movies and TV shows have embedded their own fake media within their narratives; there’s a whole website dedicated to cataloging these made-up movies and TV shows with a clever, Netflix-imitating layout, perfect for endless scrolling through writers’ inventive parodies of their industry. That is, of course, what most fake movies and shows are: spoofs of familiar genres and tropes, assembled with more playfulness than simply knocking on an existing piece of entertainment (and possibly offending its real-life creators). That seems especially true when movies make up TV shows – occasionally, it may be done incidentally or with affection, but most movies that delve into the creation and effects of television, unless they’re chronicling a specific canonized TV show from real life, are engaging in a little inter-arts cattiness. As well they should! Shows like 30 Rock prove how much fun can be had coming up with fake movies; why shouldn’t movies return the favor for their rivals? What’s far more rare is a movie that treats TV shows the way Seinfeld treated movies: as objects of everyday life and maybe playful curiosity, moreso than targets for direct satire.

These conventions make I Saw the TV Glow stand out even more. Jane Schoenbrun’s film is a coming-of-age mood piece about Owen (Justice Smith), a teenager who becomes obsessed with a cult TV show called The Pink Opaque, and bonds, however tentatively, over the show with fellow fan Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine). Eventually it becomes clear that the show speaks to a latent trans-ness that Owen never actually speaks about or act upon, befitting the movie’s ’90s setting. In a sense, Owen’s trans experiences are confined to his fandom of The Pink Opaque, a “safe” outlet that threatens to overtake him, as it seems to overtake Maddy at certain points. The show, and in turn the movie, casts a spooky spell infused with pop-culture relatability, like runes somehow found in the back of a discarded Entertainment Weekly.

That’s a lot to place on a TV show – a loaded representation of media obsession that, even more than Owen’s unverbalized trans-ness, hasn’t often been depicted in the movies, at least not with this level of otherworldliness. Interestingly, perhaps the only recent example of an in-movie show that’s depicted as more meaningful pastiche than satirical target also comes from a spooky genre movie: Jordan Peele’s Nope, where the fictional sitcom Gordy’s Home becomes a pivotal thematic lynchpin. Gordy’s Home, about a family that adopts a chimp, is clearly a hacky show, but that’s not really what interests Peele about it. He’s fascinated by the precipice of disaster where – in retrospect, following a horrific on-set animal attack – the show turned out to have been teetering all along.

Still, as much as Peele takes the show seriously as more than a spoof, we aren’t especially invited to share in anyone’s independent obsession with Gordy’s Home. Schoenbrun makes The Pink Opaque a perfect object of cultural fixation. (Well, maybe that title is both a bit obtuse for its time period and on-the-nose for its in-movie function, but at least it’s fun to say.) The filmmaker has said that they were inspired in part by an obsessive love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that’s present in such minute details as The Pink Opaque’s credits font, which appears to be an exact duplication of Buffy’s, and its young-adult, girl-heavy intensity with its own complicated mythology. (Sometimes it looks like, what if Buffy was just about Willow and Tara, and they didn’t live in the same town?) But without spoiling too much, Schoenbrun’s vision also encompasses something a little less mainstream: the late-night Saturday timeslot, for one, is more cable than Buffy’s upstart-network; some Nickelodeon vibes (or maybe The N, the young-adult nighttime equivalent of Noggin?) start to creep in. The opacity of the show on-screen – we see plenty of glimpses, yet we can’t quite know it ourselves the way the characters do, least of all as they get closer to the show’s world than mere viewers – makes its world seem vaster and more mysterious.

The vastness – even if it’s only actually spread across a comparably paltry number of episodes – is key to why The Pink Opaque must be manifested as a television show, rather than a single videocassette or DVD of a movie. Before the era of boxed sets (though TV Glow does eventually extended far enough into the characters’ future to touch upon that), a cherished TV series, especially one set outside parental limits as this is for Owen, had an unknowable quality. Unless you came in at the ground floor, the obsession could feel incomplete. If you’re drawn deep enough in, that incompleteness can feel like a part of you – or, as Owen discovers, a substitute for something more vital that’s missing from your life.

Schoenbrun really connects with these ways that loneliness, bodily alienation, and pop culture can intersect and get tangled together. Their first feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was so internal and internetty that I found it a little hard to parse, like a whispery Billie Eilish song without a chorus. I Saw the TV Glow continues its predecessor’s fixation on static – both in the sense of unchanging stillness, and the noise patterns of a television not receiving its proper signal. There are times where the new movie feels insufficiently dramatized, especially the friendship between Owen and Maddy, which sometimes looks more like a particularly evocative diagram than a pair of people. (Perhaps over-many of their scenes feature the two meeting up and having silence-freighted, inconclusive conversations.) This material may be intentionally elusive and unsatisfying, but how much of that is just an imitative fallacy in the film’s past-bedtime style? What brings the movie over, regardless of its occasional standstills, is Schoenbrun’s attention to the agony and ecstasy of fandom. Most movies are content to take a few digs at TV. I Saw the TV Glow takes a longer, more unsettling, more unsparing look at it, until it starts to blur into an unreachable alternate universe.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.