I Saw the TV Glow

Teenager Owen doesn’t really get along with the people at his small-town school. In the end, he finds a kindred soul in his older classmate Maddy. She introduces him to her favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque, and he immediately gets hooked as well. Every weekend, they enter together into the mysterious world of two girls fighting demons and a dark force in another dimension. But it is gradually getting harder and harder to return from the pink fictional world to the tediously gray reality. Isn’t the grainy TV screen offering him the only real world? Having premiered at Sundance, this film is a genre ode to the 90s television. It celebrates the first shows which offered not just queer subtext, but finally came with openly queer characters. And it does so with retro horror hyperbole, yet also with understanding and a knowing queer eye.

Jane Schoenbrun is a non-binary filmmaker and writer dedicated to making and supporting personal, queer cinema. Their work includes Sundance premieres I Saw the TV Glow and We're All Going to the World's Fair about a dangerous online game, an experimental documentary created from YouTube videos A Self-Induced Hallucination, and the punk rock variety TV show The Eyeslicer. Their first novel is almost finished.