I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

• Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
• Written by Jane Schoenbrun
• Stars Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 40 Minutes
• Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kymDzCgPwj0

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

This is a beautiful, well made movie with bright colors and angst and allegories galore. It’s a slow moving piece, and we can’t say we quite understood it, but it kept us watching with fascination. It’s just a television show that Owen is watching, so how could it be impacting reality? Well it certainly seems to be. We’d recommend it for a watch with the caveat that you’ll probably love it, hate it, or be baffled.

Spoilery Synopsis

Young Owen watches a trailer for a horror movie on TV. Credits roll. It’s 1996, and Owen is in school, waiting for his mother to vote. He sees a girl reading a book about that show, “Pink Opaque.” He talks to Maddy, who’s two years ahead of him in school. He wants to watch the show, but it’s on in the evening past his bedtime.

He asks his mom if he can stay over at a friend’s house, and she makes it all as awkward as possible. Then he goes to Maddy’s house instead, where he can stay up to watch the show.

We watch some of the show, and it’s full of lame teenage dialogue and a killer ice cream cone. Afterward, Maddy explains the show to him; the ice cream man is just the monster of the week, Mr. Melancholy is the “Big Bad.” Isabel and Tara are the main characters, and they are the Pink Opaque. He doesn’t really understand most of it. He goes to sleep on the floor at her house. In the morning, Owen walks home, thinking about the show.

Two years later, Owen’s mother has cancer. She says he always seems like he’s somewhere else lately. He still has a 10:15 bedtime, and he’s not allowed to watch the show. His father is a jerk, so he’s still not allowed to watch it. He tells Maddy this, and she starts taping it for him. She also writes him a lot of notes about the show.

He watches them over and over again. We watch part of the pilot episode with him, where the two girls meet. Owen wants to stay at Maddy’s house overnight and watch the show live, but she warns him that she’s into girls, not him. Owen doesn’t much care for boys or girls, he just likes TV shows. He thinks maybe there’s something wrong with him. They stay up late (for him) and watch the show, and Maddy cries during the episode.

Maddy tells Owen that she’s going to be leaving town soon, as her parents are just terrible. She draws the symbol that the TV show characters have on their backs, on his. That night, he dreams about the glow of the TV. Maddy tells Owen to make plans for next week, so they can run away together. He doesn’t really want to go, and Maddy disappears without a trace; all they found was her TV set burning in the backyard. “The Pink Opaque” got canceled that same month.

Eight years later, Owen works at a theater. He’s still very shy around people, and his coworkers laugh at him. One night, on the drive home from work, he sees strange lights in the road- a fallen power cable. He finds a page from one of the Pink Opaque books. Owen’s mother has died years before, and his father is still awful.

Owen goes to the grocery store and sees someone acting strangely. It’s Maddy. We cut to a band singing a song as Owen and Maddy talk in the back. Everyone thought she was dead, but all she wants to talk about is the show. “Do you remember it as just a TV show? Do you ever get confused? Like the memory isn’t quite right?” We flash back to her making him wear dresses during the show. Were they actually in the show?

She says she has been inside the show for all these years. She can’t stay here much longer, she’s going back soon. She wants him to meet her tomorrow night at midnight. Owen goes home and watches the tape of the show’s final episode. It absolutely doesn’t feel like a kids’ show anymore. Both the main characters die and are buried alive. Then the show just ends.

Owen’s father goes into the basement and finds Owen trying to crawl inside the picture tube of the TV. The father carries him up to the bathroom, where he vomits TV sparks.

Owen goes to see Maddy, who explains that she ran away to Phoenix and got a job. She bought a coffin and paid some guy to bury her alive. She talks about watching herself start to die and then clawing her way out of the coffin. She goes on and on about her exploits and drama. She says all his memories were put there to distract him from the Midnight Realm.

Owen says “This is just the suburbs.” He thinks she may have gone insane, but follows along anyway. She really seems to think she’s in the show. He tackles her and then runs away.

Owen waited for Maddy to come back, but he never saw her again. Her story couldn’t be true, could it? What if she was right?

More years pass. Owen throws out his old CRT TV and gets a new flat-screen. He tells us directly that he’s got his own family now. He’s watching “The Pink Opaque” on streaming now. It was nothing like he remembered, truly awful, cheesy, and cheap. It’s nothing like what he saw when he was younger, and that embarasses him.

Twenty years later, older Owen still works at the Fun Center, but he doesn’t look healthy. He freaks out and screams during a birthday party, and everyone freezes as he rants and cries. He later goes into the restroom and uses a box cutter to slice open his own chest. When he tears his chest open, there’s a TV inside there, playing the good shows.

Commentary

I’m sure this is some kind of artsy allegory for something, but I have no idea what. There’s a lot here about being a fan of media, especially before the Internet, and how people would obsess over their favorite shows– especially kids who didn’t have anything else. Maddy talks about the real world suffocating him, and toward the end, more and more, Owen has trouble breathing.

It’s very atmospheric, visually interesting, but slow-moving. We went into this completely blind, and still felt kind of blind afterward. I never really did have any idea where it was going, but it kept my interest throughout. 

I liked it a lot, but I feel like I didn’t really understand it as much as I should have.