Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow follows misfit teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) as they forge an unlikely friendship over their mutual love for a supernatural TV show.
Full disclosure: I’m not normally a target audience for the ’80s nostalgia wave that we’ve been experiencing. No shade to ’80s wave, but that nostalgia is meant either for Gen X who lived it, or the Zoomers and under, who see the aesthetic as retro— which it is. I understand both of those compulsions and appreciate them without being a part of either group.
But Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a throwback for me, the Millennial whose nostalgia hasn’t been really tapped into yet. I’m not interested in early ’00s drama—I remember high school too clearly to be nostalgic for it… but show me a scene of a primary school gym class on parachute day, and it really is like my heart turned into a claw machine, only good for reaching out because it can’t hold onto anything (to paraphrase the Phoebe Bridgers theme song).
I Saw the TV Glow accesses a vein of nostalgia for those who came of age to 1990s camp, cult horror TV. Especially the way those shows brought misfits together. It gave us something important to bond over. Something that couldn’t be minimized as “growing pains” because every episode was life or death. And then I Saw the TV Glow unravels the camp of the cult TV show and restores it to its original horror. It’s genius.
Let’s Talk about the Phenomenon of Nostalgia as a Whole…
The images in I Saw the TV Glow are so majestic; outside my memory, nothing really looked like that. The cafeteria probably smelled like bad microwave pizza and the gym probably smelled like vomit because it was carpeted. But it’s so idealized on screen that I can’t help but feel that tug backward.
I don’t recall that time well enough to remember all of the details—only pieces. So now, I understand the allure of nostalgia. It romanticizes a period of your own life that you remember without making it too real. It feels like a fantasy you actually lived.
A lot of memories of childhood—especially in the ’90s—manifest that way for our generation. They’re completely buried (pun intended) until something random jogs a memory. In my case, it was the movie itself that reminded me of being a total sixth-grade misfit, sitting in the dingy hallway decorated with paper cutout maxims, until someone introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Charmed.
Then, that’s the thing that we talked about. We might have had nothing else in common, but we could talk about the show. That’s how I Saw The TV Glow’s Owen and Maddy become friends. He asks about the TV show guide she’s reading, and after that, he sneaks off to watch The Pink Opaque with her every weekend. He has a friend now. She’s two years older, and they don’t have much else in common, but that doesn’t matter.
In many ways, I still believe in that tactic of making friends. You might be in the same camp if you’re reading this article. Sure, we could have an adult conversation about our investment strategies or what seasonal sale is coming up—and we will, I’m sure—but for a moment, we can feel like we’re sitting in the lunchroom after school next to a Fruitopia machine and bonding with other weirdos over cult TV shows. That feeling is truly priceless.
The Stimulus that Makes You Recall the Time in the First Place…
The shows we bond over now are usually the ones airing or streaming new episodes. But once in a while, there’s that deep cut. An allusion to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that makes you turn to an acquaintance and ask in full seriousness, “Roald Dahl fucking hated kids, right?” And not only do you get to tap into that original core memory, but you’re bonding with a new friend about it.
Pretty soon, you’re talking about where you were the first time you watched the show. What you were feeling. How the show made you feel seen. And you’re only just now understanding that you related with Charlie because he too felt like he had to hold his whole family together on his own.
The cast of I Saw the TV Glow is one point that specifically recalls that ’90s nostalgia. Not only do the styles and attitudes of Owen and Maddy deeply reflect public school archetypes, but Fred Durst is also in there. The real Fred Durst. He plays Owen’s strict dad. So that’s a real throwback acknowledgment, too.
*Warning: Spoilers below*
Something similar happens in I Saw the TV Glow. The show is coming to an abrupt finale after five seasons, and Maddy’s planning her getaway. She wants Owen to come with her, but he’s younger. He’s terrified. He can’t do it. And then Maddy disappears. All that’s left is the burned-out shell of her TV. And, of course, a week or so later, Owen receives a new VHS tape with the finale recorded on it. I’ll return to this finale in just a second; bear with me.
When Owen is grocery shopping five years after his best friend Maddy disappeared, and she just appears in the produce aisle… she asks him if he remembers her. It’s almost like it’s a joke. He remembers only her. And when she later asks (at a dive bar that would absolutely be my bar in real life) if he remembers that TV show they used to watch together….
Of course he does. It was the basis for their friendship. He might not have thought about The Pink Opaque in years, but she’s just unlocked a whole vault of memories. And then, Maddy tells him the show is real. Just like she said when they were kids, “Sometimes, The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life.” Didn’t it feel real?
But then the ’90s Shows Don’t Hold Up…
The thing is, a lot of TV shows from the ’90s just don’t hold up when you watch them now. One thing that let my growing brain watch them in the first place is that, on screen, those types of shows didn’t really scare me. Not only is it a disappointment when you go back to watch them, but they don’t hold the same magic for you anymore.
You can appreciate the camp, however unintentional it is, or the aged special effects for how cutting-edge they were at the time… but the thrill is gone. It’s not scary anymore. Not even compared to what else you could have been watching.
I Saw the TV Glow even addresses that phenomenon. He answers Maddy’s question: yes, it felt real at the time. But “this isn’t the Midnight Realm. It’s the suburbs.“ It was just a TV show.
That’s when Maddy reveals that the show is real. “Are you sure?“ she asks him. “Are you sure that’s all it was?“ She goes on to say that their lives are mirroring the show’s finale. They’re actually the protagonists of the show. She’s really Tara. He’s really Isabel. And, of course, Owen can’t really go for that, not even after her detailed explanation of the alignment between their lives and those on The Pink Opaque.
And Yet. In I Saw the TV Glow… the Show’s Horror is Restored.
But rather than leaning into the camp the way we tend to do, this movie reinvigorated the horror. True, when Owen and Maddy watch the actual show in real time, it comes across as a little silly. There’s a man on the moon who wants to make them sad.
When Owen rewatches the show in his thirties, he finds it super cliché, camp, just outright bad. It shatters his memory of watching The Pink Opaque as a child. It’s happened to all of us. Our memories have idealized our formative experiences. When we revisit them, they don’t exist like they did then.
But on Owen’s second revisit to the series, shit changes. The images are still very ’90s, but I did not know that “bad“ ’90s special effects could be scary. They are. It’s a genius bend to incorporate the grainy, weird effects into the contemporary film aesthetic, but it works. It works really well.
At one point, Owen vomits white noise into the bathtub while his father (Fred Durst) turns the shower on him to cool him off. It’s incredible. How did they pull it off and make it seem so real?
The plotlines are scary now, too. In the finale, Mr. Melancholy has sent his demons to give the main characters a kind of paralytic drug. It sends them into a dream state. They’ll now exist in a different reality—our reality. And time will expand to include a full lifetime here, while it’s just minutes in the Midnight Realm. He says in an extended, close-cropped monologue, “You won’t even know you’re dying.”
Owen’s rewatch fits perfectly into the reality Maddy outlined for him when she returned after her disappearance. And Owen wonders whether he was wrong to dismiss her crazy, impossible concept, even as his own life starts to implode.
Whichever dimension is real, I Saw the TV Glow revives the worldbuilding of cult classic 1990s television and incorporates a new layer that allows nostalgia to touch viewers again, the way it did the first time. It’s fresh, somehow. It’s a new explanation for a truth you believed in all along.
I Saw the TV Glow is now playing in limited theaters and will be widely available in theaters May 17, 2024. For more, watch the I Saw The TV Glow trailer.
