I Saw the TV Glow

Snapshot

I Saw the TV Glow is Jane Schoenbrun's second narrative feature, a horror-adjacent drama about two suburban teenagers bound together by a canceled 1990s young-adult television series called The Pink Opaque. Owen (Justice Smith) and the slightly older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) form their friendship around the show, a monster-of-the-week saga that Maddy insists is more real than the beige lives they are living. Over roughly two decades, the film watches Owen fail to answer the question the show keeps posing: whether the flat, suffocating world of the suburbs is the truth, or the buried "Midnight Realm" of The Pink Opaque is. Released by A24 in 2024 after a Sundance premiere, the film arrived as one of the year's most discussed American independent works — widely and openly read as an allegory of gender dysphoria and egg-cracking, though its ambitions extend to nostalgia, dissociation, and the way screens metabolize a life. It confirmed Schoenbrun as a distinctive authorial voice in a new strain of American art-horror.

Industry & production

The film was produced and distributed by A24, the boutique studio that had become the dominant home for elevated American genre cinema in the 2010s and 2020s, and it fits squarely inside A24's institutional profile: modest budget, festival launch, auteur-forward marketing. Among its producing partners was Fruit Tree, the production company founded by Emma Stone and Dave McCary; Stone is credited as a producer, part of a broader pattern in this period of established performers using producing capital to underwrite formally adventurous first- and second-time directors. Schoenbrun had come to the project off the back of We're All Going to Die at the World's Fair (2021), a micro-budget feature made largely alone and celebrated on the festival circuit; TV Glow represents the step up to a fuller crew, a recognizable cast, and a distributor's promotional machine, while retaining the intimacy of the earlier work.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 and received a theatrical release in the United States that spring. Precise budget and box-office figures are not something I can cite reliably here, and I will not invent them; what is well established is that the film performed as a specialty release — strong per-theater interest and critical saturation rather than wide commercial reach — and that its cultural footprint, particularly online, exceeded its ticket sales. The soundtrack, assembled as an A24 music release, became a notable commercial and promotional object in its own right.

Technology

TV Glow is a digitally photographed film that is, at the level of its craft, obsessed with an older display technology: the cathode-ray-tube television and the degraded textures of VHS, cable broadcast, and late-night airings. Much of the film's design labor goes into simulating the look of 1990s consumer video — scan lines, blooming phosphor glow, the specific washed color of a signal watched too close and too late. The title itself names this: the "glow" is the CRT's emission, the light of a screen imprinting itself on a face in a dark room. The production reconstructs an analog media environment (tube TVs, taped episodes, a fictional channel) using contemporary digital tools, and the friction between the sharp digital capture of the present-day scenes and the fuzzed video of The Pink Opaque is itself a dramatic device. In this the film belongs to a broader 2020s tendency toward "analog nostalgia" horror, in which obsolete media formats — tape, broadcast static, creepypasta lore — carry dread precisely because they are decaying and half-remembered.

Technique

Cinematography

Eric Yue's cinematography is the film's most immediately identifiable signature. The palette is built on saturated, unnatural color — chalky pinks, bruised purples, acid greens, and the ambient blue of screen light — laid over the deliberately flattened, over-lit blandness of suburban interiors and school hallways. Yue and Schoenbrun stage many compositions with a frontal, slightly airless symmetry that makes the ordinary world feel like a set, so that when the film tips into the neon of a nightclub, a suburban cul-de-sac lit like a stage, or the fluorescent aisles of a big-box store, the shift reads as a rupture in reality rather than a change of location. Chalk-drawn text, glowing signage, and the recurring image of light bleeding from a doorway or a screen recur as motifs. The camera favors held, dilated takes over coverage, letting discomfort accumulate.

Editing

Sofi Marshall, who also cut World's Fair, edits the film across a long and deliberately disorienting timeline that leaps forward years at a stroke, often without the usual signposts, mirroring Owen's dissociative relationship to his own life. The cutting integrates three registers — the "real" world, the in-world footage of The Pink Opaque, and passages that blur the two — and much of the film's unease comes from how it withholds clear boundaries between them. Time compresses violently in the back half; the editing enacts the sensation of a life passing while its owner is absent from it.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The production design draws a hard line between two aesthetic worlds: the deadened naturalism of the suburbs — wood-paneled dens, popcorn ceilings, the cold of a school at night — and the handmade, papier-mâché fantasy of The Pink Opaque, whose monsters (an ice-cream-man villain, the moon-faced antagonist "Mr. Melancholy") deliberately evoke the cheapness and sincerity of 1990s children's television effects. Chalk, the color pink, and the recurring instruction "There is still time" function as visual refrains. The staging repeatedly isolates Owen within frames — behind glass, at the edge of a room, under a screen's glow — visualizing a self that never fully inhabits its surroundings.

Sound

Sound is central to the film's affect. Alex G (Alex Giannascoli) composed the score, contributing a fragile, warped, indie-folk-inflected soundscape that sits between lullaby and unease. The film also functions partly as a musical showcase: a lengthy sequence set in a bar stages live performances by contemporary artists, and the A24 soundtrack gathered a roster of indie and experimental musicians whose songs act as emotional set-pieces rather than background. Sound design leans on the hums and hisses of electronics — static, the whine of a tube TV, the ambient drone of empty rooms — so that even silence carries a technological texture.

Performance

Justice Smith gives a performance of near-total interiority as Owen, playing a character defined by suppression: a flattened voice, a body that seems to apologize for itself, an affect of chronic, unspeakable discomfort. The role's difficulty is that its drama is almost entirely withheld, and Smith carries the film on the smallest registers of hesitation and dread, aging the character across decades. Brigette Lundy-Paine, as Maddy, plays the film's charge of conviction and escape — more openly desperate, more willing to name what Owen cannot. Their two-hander scenes, especially a late monologue, anchor the film. Supporting turns — including Danielle Deadwyler and, in a piece of pointed casting, Fred Durst as Owen's father — populate the suburban world with muted, watchful presences.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's dramatic mode is deliberately anti-climactic, even anti-cathartic. It is structured as a tragedy of the road not taken: Maddy offers Owen an exit from a life that is killing him, and the horror is that he cannot, or will not, take it. Where conventional narrative would build to the crossing of a threshold, TV Glow stages the refusal of that threshold, again and again, and lets the audience feel the cost accrue over years. Its central device — a television show that may be reality and a reality that may be the fiction — is a frame for a story about self-recognition deferred. The mode is closer to elegy than to thriller: dread without release, a slow suffocation the film asks us to sit inside rather than escape.

Genre & cycle

Nominally horror-drama, the film belongs to the 2010s–2020s cycle of American "elevated" or art-horror associated with A24 and its peers, in which genre iconography carries psychological and identity-based subtext. But it sits at that cycle's experimental edge, closer to a mood piece than a scare machine. It also participates in a specific sub-current of media-nostalgia horror — works built from the residue of old television, tapes, and internet lore — and in the emergence of an explicitly trans horror, a small but growing body of films using the genre's language of transformation, monstrosity, and doubled bodies to dramatize gender. Its show-within-a-show is a loving pastiche of a real genre: the 1990s supernatural teen serial in the lineage of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and Goosebumps.

Authorship & method

Jane Schoenbrun (who is nonbinary and uses they/them) is the film's writer-director and its animating sensibility. TV Glow is the second panel of what Schoenbrun has described as a loosely linked body of work about screens, alienation, and the internet-mediated self, following We're All Going to Die at the World's Fair. Schoenbrun's method is deeply personal: they have discussed the film in relation to their own experience of transition and dysphoria, framing it not as a coded message but as an emotional autobiography rendered through genre. Their key collaborators form a continuing team: cinematographer Eric Yue and editor Sofi Marshall shape the film's image and rhythm, while musician Alex G supplies its score and the wider soundtrack extends Schoenbrun's affinity for a specific corner of contemporary indie music. The authorial approach fuses fan-cultural sincerity — a genuine love of the disposable media the film pastiches — with formal control, so that nostalgia is never merely warm; it is the trap.

Movement / national cinema

The film is a work of American independent cinema, produced within the A24-centered ecosystem that had, by the 2020s, become the effective institutional home for auteur-driven genre film in the United States. It can be located in a loose contemporary tendency — sometimes discussed as a new queer or trans wave in American independent film — and in the broader "post-internet" sensibility that treats screens, feeds, and online subcultures as the native environment of selfhood. It is not attached to a formal movement with a manifesto; its lineage is better understood through affinities than membership.

Era / period

Two time frames matter. The film is set largely in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it reconstructs that period's suburban and media textures with obsessive specificity — the cable schedule, the tube TV, the taped episode as sacred object. But it is unmistakably a product of the mid-2020s, a moment preoccupied with nostalgia as a commodity, with the parasocial intensity of fandom, and with questions of gender and self-recognition that had moved to the center of American cultural life. The film's power comes partly from the gap between these eras: it looks back at 1990s media through 2020s eyes and finds in that childhood ephemera the buried evidence of a self that went unlived.

Themes

The film's most discussed theme is gender dysphoria and the "egg" — the pre-transition self that has not yet recognized itself — dramatized through Owen's inability to accept that his ordinary life is a kind of death. But the film layers several concerns: nostalgia as both refuge and prison; the parasocial power of media to feel truer than lived experience; dissociation and the sensation of watching one's own life from outside; the suburb as an engine of conformity; and the terror of time passing unclaimed. The recurring line "There is still time" operates as the film's ambiguous heart — at once a promise and a taunt. Crucially, the film resists reducing these to a single key; the dysphoria reading is the strongest and most authorially supported, but the film's images of buried selves and unreal realities reach toward a wider audience of the alienated.

Reception, canon & influence

I Saw the TV Glow was met with strong critical acclaim following its Sundance premiere, and it became one of the most written-about American independent films of 2024, appearing on numerous year-end lists and generating a large body of essayistic and personal criticism, much of it centered on the trans reading and on the film's use of nostalgia. Its reception was notably discourse-driven, sustained online by viewers who found their own experience mirrored in Owen and Maddy; the soundtrack amplified this reach. (Specific award tallies I won't enumerate beyond noting that the film featured prominently in the independent-film awards conversation for its year.)

Looking backward, the film's influences are legible. The strongest is David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks and especially Fire Walk With Me haunt the film's suburban dread, its evil beneath the ordinary, and its logic of doubled realities; critics widely noted the debt. The tradition of 1990s teen supernatural television — Buffy, Are You Afraid of the Dark? — is the film's overt source material, treated with fan-scholar affection. One can also situate it near the millennial-suburban-uncanny of Donnie Darko and near the internet-horror and creepypasta sensibility Schoenbrun had already mined in World's Fair.

Looking forward, its legacy is still forming — it is too recent for a settled verdict, and I won't overstate it. What can be said is that the film immediately became a reference point for an emerging trans and queer horror, a demonstration that genre could carry that experience without literalizing it, and that it consolidated Schoenbrun's standing as a filmmaker whose future work would be closely watched. In the near term its clearest influence is atmospheric: it helped legitimize analog-nostalgia and screen-alienation as a serious mode within American art-horror, and it modeled a way of making deeply personal identity narrative through the grammar of the uncanny rather than the memoir.