It stars Justice Smith and Jack Haven[a] as two troubled high school students whose connection to their favorite television show drives them to question their reality and identities.

The supporting cast includes Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Ian Foreman, Fred Durst, and Danielle Deadwyler.

At her urging, Owen rewatches the final episode, in which Mr. Melancholy buries Isabel and Tara alive before imprisoning them in a pocket universe known as the "Midnight Realm".

The next night, Maddy explains to Owen that, after running away, she continued to feel unsatisfied, so she paid a man to bury her alive; after suffocating, she awoke in The Pink Opaque as Tara.

She explains that they are in fact in the Midnight Realm and that their true identities are that of Tara and Isabel respectively; their memories of their real lives have manifested as episodes of a TV show.

Schoenbrun began work on the script for I Saw the TV Glow three months after they had begun undergoing hormone replacement therapy, amid what they described as "overwhelming calamity" following having come out as transgender.

In featuring the transgender themes, Schoenbrun deliberately avoided making transitioning or coming out explicitly central to the plot, opting instead to write the story as an allegory so as to distinguish it from other films on the topic.

[7] In August 2022, it was announced Justice Smith, Jack Haven[a], Helena Howard, Danielle Deadwyler, Amber Benson, Ian Foreman, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Danny Tamberelli, Phoebe Bridgers, Lindsey Jordan, Fred Durst, Haley Dahl, and Kristina Esfandiari had joined the cast.

[6] In a June 2024 profile of themself published in The New Yorker, Schoenbrun discussed how their relationship with their family had influenced the film's story, saying:[6] TV Glow is about something I think a lot of trans people understand.

And I think this does a disservice to queer people who are not in control of whether that work can be done.I Saw the TV Glow is heavily influenced by[17][18] and draws parallels to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), including its use of The Pink Opaque, which features similar elements like strong female leads and a mix of mythic and monster of the week episodes.

The cameo by Benson, who played lesbian character Tara Maclay on Buffy, "felt healing in a way" for Schoenbrun,[18] who relied on the show as a coping mechanism during adolescence.

As the main characters lose or find themselves in the show, Owen's story becomes a demonstration of "what happens to a trans person when the world makes the prospect of transitioning too terrifying to ever look at straight-on".

The website's critics consensus reads, "With a distinctive visual aesthetic that enhances its emotionally resonant narrative, I Saw the TV Glow further establishes writer-director Jane Schoenbrun as a rising talent.

[34] To Guy Lodge of Variety, TV Glow is "both promising psychodrama fodder on its own terms, and of a piece with the particular fixations Schoenbrun has established across their small oeuvre thus far".

[35] David Ehrlich of IndieWire wrote, "Schoenbrun's astonishing second feature manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale".

[37][38] Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times criticized the film as a "collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin", noting that it "invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence".