I Saw the TV Glow Is an Instant Cult Classic. Jane Schoenbrun Tells Us Where It Came From

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The precious, intensely personal touch Schoenbrun lends to the soundtrack is symptomatic of their crafting of the film overall; TV Glow has the intimate, scrapbook quality of a gel pen-scrawled note slipped into your locker, or a scratched-up mix CD made by a friend. It feels at once like a visitation to a past life and a celestial transmission from another world.

Schoenbrun took the time to chat with GQ about jumping from microbudget filmmaking to working with A24, their formative love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more.

GQ: Where does the name The Pink Opaque come from?

JANE SCHOENBRUN: A Cocteau Twins compilation album from the 1980s. It was a placeholder at first, and then I was like, "I gotta come up with a TV show name as good as The Pink Opaque," and I couldn't. It's incredibly hard to come up with a good name for a '90s TV show that doesn't sound like a parody. It's such a gorgeous phrase, too. It's mythological in this really fun way.

In a tweet, you alluded to the film having a connection to Frasier… Can you explain?

In an early version of We're All Going To the World's Fair, actually, there was a subplot in that movie about this group of edgelords on the internet who, in this very irony-poisoned way, were all obsessed with Frasier, and they called themselves the Crane Crew. They built these custom coffins with a television screen on the inside of the lid, and they would bury themselves alive with a live feed into the coffin so you could watch them watching Frasier underground. They would watch Frasier from the beginning and binge it until they starved to death or suffocated or died. They'd just be lying there staring straight up as it played and people would be like, "What episode are they up to?" and it would be this Internet phenomenon.

So yeah, when I saw that tweet some kid sent out about, "What if it was I Saw the TV Glow for Frasier," I was like, "That's crazy, because actually…"

If you had to pick a show to be programmed into your coffin…

To slowly suffocate and starve to death while watching? Frasier! [Laughs] Maybe Planet Earth. Maybe you just want to go gently into the good night. The Great British Bake Off. I feel like if you go with something that's too much of a balm, it almost becomes a sick joke.

You've got to rage against the dying of the light just a little bit.

Exactly.

When and how did TV Glow materialize in relation to World's Fair?

I wrote TV Glow in October-November of 2020, as I was waiting to find out if World's Fair was going to get into Sundance. I think I was distracting myself, or just getting some stress out in a productive way. I knew that it's very easy for a small debut film like World's Fair to slip through the cracks, and so the future that I wanted to have as an artist felt very vulnerable at that moment.