Way too stilted and spiritless performances mar Schoenbrun’s aesthetically ‘flamboyant’ but ultimately vacant feature about gender and mediated identities, as two teenage social misfits find a human connection over a long-running television show that mysteriously gets cancelled.

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A follow-up to 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow sees writer-director Jane Schoenbrun slowly but surely building some kind of cult following with her off-kilter films that tackle the existential angst of young people with an obsessive relationship with ‘content’. 

World’s Fair explored the realm of online role-playing games, but with TV Glow, Schoenbrun reminds us (particularly the Millennials) of those days in the ‘80s and ‘90s sitting glued in front of our television set watching our favourite show. 

For me, it was Saturday mornings with ‘Power Rangers’; for social misfits Owen and Maddy who find in each other an unlikely human connection, it is the ‘Pink Opaque’, a fictive supernatural series with multiple seasons that got cancelled under mysterious circumstances. 

With echoes of David Lynch’s dark, surrealistic tone, TV Glow is, however, more aesthetically ‘flamboyant’, with conspicuous uses of neon colours and the ‘glows’ befitting the title.  Purples and pinks, especially, create an otherworldly, horror-inflected vibe. 

“Isn’t that a show for girls?”

There is something disquieting about the world Owen and Maddy live in, a world that doesn’t quite accept them as themselves. 

There is an obvious queer allegory in Schoenbrun’s work as Maddy proclaims herself to be a lesbian while Owen isn’t sure if he likes girls or boys.  It is a time of confusion and the feeling doesn’t abate. 

It is also a confounding film that I can’t say I enjoyed or got something meaningful out of. It has interesting ideas on gender and mediated identities undergirding its narrative but the film lost me at some point mostly because I found the performances way too stilted and spiritless. 

The ‘strangeness’ of TV Glow still keeps it interesting, be it employing text-on-screen, breaking the fourth wall as a modus operandi, or featuring an emo setlist of songs, but there is something vacant and sedate underneath all the deliberations on what it means to find oneself in a body that isn’t necessarily corporeal.

Grade: C

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