Episode 791: I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Owen (Justice Smith) is a quiet kid on the outskirts of everything — his school, his family, his own life. When he meets Maddy (Jack Haven), a fellow outcast devoted to late-night supernatural TV show The Pink Opaque, something stirs in him that he can't quite name. Together they lose themselves in the show's mythology, its heroes Isabel and Tara battling the dream-warping Mr. Melancholy from within the Midnight Realm. When Maddy disappears and the show gets canceled, Owen finds himself alone in a suburb designed to swallow people whole — watching years pass like seconds.

Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow asks what it costs to not know yourself, wrapping that terror in the hypnotic glow of '90s television and the specific dread of adolescence that never ends. Horror film, coming-of-age film, and something harder to name — it builds a portrait of a person burying themselves alive.

Lu Etienne and Maxi Breckwoldt join Mike to trace Owen's journey from the bleachers to the Fun Center and beyond, unpacking the film's psychic static, its suburban uncanny, and the question haunting every frame: what if you're already suffocating, and you just don't know it yet?

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