I Think That I Like TV Shows.
I saw (and continue to see) the TV glow.
June 14, 2024
I remember exactly where I was when I watched I Saw The TV Glow. I would certainly hope so; it was only a month ago.
I could have watched it in the theater, but it didn’t feel right. Whenever possible, I like to meet Art where it sits. I genuinely attempt to consume content in the most-optimal way suggested by the creator, and when no method is suggested I give it my best shot. For TV Glow, I wanted to be alone, unbothered and in the dark. I wanted to be in my basement, dwarfed by my weapons-grade home theater with a bucket of popcorn. Just me and my one true love since childhood.
My television, of course.
After all, that’s…uh…some of what TV Glow is all about, right? At least, that’s the facet I want to focus on. It’s no surprise, secret or deeply-coded Easter egg that TV Glow is a beautiful, moving and oftentimes heartbreaking look at gender dysphoria. Director Jane Schoenbrun said as such: “TV Glow is about something I think a lot of trans people understand...the tension between the space that you exist within, which feels like home, and the simultaneous terror and liberation of understanding that that space might not be able to hold you in your true form.” It’s an allegory, but it’s not delivered subliminally. It’s not up for debate. The subtext is the marquee.
And it is beautiful. Heartbreaking. Uncomfortable. Sometimes terrifying. But it would also be selling the film short if the allegory was all that was being discussed. TV Glow is a coming-of-age story done universally well, and a good coming-of-age story can resonate with everyone in some way for some reason at some time. I found myself empathizing with the main characters as much as it stands to reason I’d be able to. The uneasiness. The awkwardness. The panic and anxiety. This is universal. This is growing up.
These sorts of films- these 90’s set pieces that are more Vibes than raw continuity- can be hit-or-miss to those of us who were there to live through the moment as it happened. Sometimes the sheen is too pristine, the needle drops too on-the-nose. The feeling that the producers were focusing more on “Hey, remember this?” than genuinely capturing the era. You can end up feeling more gaslit than anything. A bad representation can make the moments that mattered so much to you at the moment feel hollow.
Then sometimes, it’s done right. The true agony of adolescence is yanked directly from the heart of a talented director with a uniquely personal story to tell. Sure, the soundtrack still slaps and the neon-soaked malls and movie theaters are still as alluring as ever even though they didn’t really look like that in the 90’s, but there also exists the real memories of the time that you forgot. The obsessions that were too unbearable to store in your conscience into adulthood. The moments that mattered so much to you at the time that, when you look back, turned out to be nothing more than…a moment.
Again, the 1996 setting in TV Glow (the first of many decades we see throughout the film) adds an element that speaks more loudly to those of us of a certain age. No cell phones. Perhaps a car phone if you were rich. Early Internet if any at all. You had to watch a television show as it aired, and if you missed it and didn’t tape it (as Maddy begins to meticulously do for Owen when he’s not allowed to watch The Pink Opaque), you had no guarantee that you’d ever see it again. It was just…gone forever.
If you wanted to salvage something from becoming nothing more than ephemera, you had to love it. Truly and wholeheartedly. For better or for worse. And you had to have someone to love it with.
December 21, 1991
I remember exactly where I was when I watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the first time. I would certainly hope so; it was the best day of my life.
To this day, when I’ve had too much to drink, or when I have a prolonged, serene moment of staring into the middle distance for several minutes at a time, I often come back to this one specific day. I think about this day at least once a month, if only for a few seconds. It’s memorable to me for reasons I fully understand, but has become a core memory for reasons I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to understand.
I was spending the last weekend before Christmas at my cousin’s house in Menasha, a town that technically no longer exists. It was everything you’d want in an early-90’s weekend among a couple of adolescent boys (should you desire that sort of thing). A Godfather’s Pizza delivery from when Herman Cain was mercifully unknown to the American public. A 12-pack of Mountain Dew from when it had real sugar and was considered the most-caffeinated drink you could legally feed to your children without having them relocated by CPS. Cable TV from when it was still a luxury in Winnebago County. A boombox with cassettes strewn about (Use Your Illusion I & II were in heavy rotation). Sleeping bags on the floor in the den. The only light coming from the Christmas tree and the TV. No bedtime in sight.
We donned stocking caps and rode our bikes to Captain’s Video to rent as many Nintendo games as we could get our hands on (and sadly left with Fester’s Quest, one of the shittiest games ever made). My cousin knew he was getting a Sega Genesis for Christmas. He had peeked into his dad’s present stash and was fully aware it was in the house, but we were sternly warned to, and I quote, “not so much as utter the word ‘Genesis’ unless you were referring to The Bible.” So Nintendo it was, at least for one more weekend.
It wasn’t an unseasonably warm day, but I remember we spent the sunlight hours biking through town, nearly getting into a fistfight in the woods behind the snowed-over baseball diamond and getting into an actual fistfight in the driveway. An older (11!) neighbor held me down and put a lit firecracker in my shoe. In the commotion, I didn’t realize what had happened until I got back in the house and realized my foot had been blistered and my plastic shoes reeked of creosote. That evening, we had to put the shoes on the porch because they stunk up the entire house.
And when the Mountain Dew high dissipated, and when we were told to turn Use Your Illusion off, and when we realized exactly how shitty of a game Fester’s Quest was, we got into our sleeping bags and turned on the television. And that’s when I saw Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the first time. Episode 321: ‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.’ I understood maybe 10% of the jokes. I wasn’t even sure the movie was an actual movie, or was something produced as part of the show itself. It mattered not.
When it was over, I drifted off to sleep while listening to the sound of traffic driving by my cousin’s house. I had never fallen asleep to the sound of traffic before. I had never fallen asleep to the sound of anything before.
In 1991, where I was living was almost comically rural. No paved driveway on which I could be assaulted by older neighbor kids and have an appendage set ablaze. I didn’t even have neighbors. No baseball diamond, no video store, no Godfather’s Pizza, no cable TV, oftentimes no TV whatsoever due to antenna issues. And on the day of December 21, I did so many pedestrian things for the first time that it felt like I left Menasha a different person somehow. A handful of new experiences all Katamari’d themselves together into a deeply-emotional core memory, and MST3K was one of them.
Look…it’s not like I chose this day to be my Favorite Day. It won through attrition. It crept into my consciousness and re-introduced itself every time I walked my dog around the block in the middle of the night. Every time I heard traffic and children off in the distance. Seemingly every time I turned on the TV when I couldn’t sleep. Even the fact that the town in which I experienced this day no longer exists only makes sense given the dreamlike haze by which I recall the moments spent there.
It’s a good memory. I like remembering it.
August 6, 2005
I remember exactly where I was when I watched the Lost pilot episode. It wasn’t when you probably would have guessed.
The Summer of 2005 was my first year as an Adult. Yes, the Missus and I moved in together in 2002. Yes, we got married in 2004. Yes, I graduated from college in 2004. Yes, in 2004 I somehow managed to get hired at a place I still work (a trait that I fully acknowledge is uncommon among millennials, even us elders). But if 2002-2004 were our first steps toward independence, 2005 was when we took what we learned and confidently leapt into the unknown.
We weren’t newlyweds anymore. We weren’t recent grads anymore. We both took more important jobs at our places of business. We also moved out of our first apartment and into our second. And in that August of 2005, with a fresh coat of paint on nearly everything in our lives, we sat down together and celebrated a job well done by catching up on Season 1 of Lost.
We were a bit preoccupied when Lost initially premiered on 9/22/04, but the chatter was finally too large to ignore. Not only were our friends, relatives and coworkers talking about it, but by that point I had a blog audience at the ole’ Communist Dance Party that wouldn’t stop talking about it, either. “What? You’re friggin’ Mr. TV Dork and you’re not watching Lost?! What’s your problem, exactly? You think you’re better than me?!” Hostile bunch, the lot of them.
But catching up in 2005 wasn’t as easy as you’d think. Not yet, at least.
DVRs were not commonplace. TiVo was a stand-alone purchase, but we likely couldn’t afford one and my cable provider had nothing to offer at the time (Charter, a company so reviled and loathed that, instead of improving their dismal reputation, simply threw their arms into the air and rebranded as Spectrum). Digital episodes were still on the horizon (which would consist of downloading them to your iPod for $2.99 each), and the DVD wouldn’t be released proper until September. So from August 6 to September 6, we unknowingly got to do something for the final time: We caught up on a TV show through reruns at the whim of the ABC Network, on their date, on their time, whenever they chose to rerun an episode.
This kind of pathetic, Cro-Magnon behavior used to be called “Watching TV.” Now it’s called “Appointment Television.” And Lost was the last* great Appointment Television series.
(*The most-watched episode of Lost was 23.47 million viewers. The finale of Game of Thrones was watched by 13.61 million viewers. Breaking Bad? 10.28. It’s not up for discussion.)
To this day, I will not only defend and participate in Appointment Television, I will argue that people love it whether they realize it or not. It’s communal. It’s shared. It’s what it means to be human. We still (still!) somehow like to have things in common that we can talk about, no matter how fragmented and algorithmically-catered our tastes have become. It was interesting to see early streaming pioneers run into this issue and be stunned by it. “B-but…we’re offering you whatever you want whenever you want. And you still want an option where you’re told what to watch when we decide you should watch it?”
And we were like, “Yup, pretty much.”
When the WWE Network launched in 2014, it was one of the first over-the-top streaming services in the world. When WWE fans were told that, for $9.99 a month, they’d have unlimited, on-demand access to the entire WWE library, they justifiably geeked out (I was a day one subscriber). But the fans also wanted a 24/7 streaming channel that just…you know…showed stuff.
Despite all metrics and surveys and future media projections, we discovered early in the history of Streaming TV that there will always be a place for passive entertainment and a reprieve from decision fatigue. The rise and popularity of FAST TV networks like Pluto and The Roku Channel only prove this point. You can’t skip a single commercial, but it’s also free, like how TV had been from 1936 to, like, five years ago. On-Demand TV was the future, but it wasn’t going anywhere without Appointment TV and Passive TV tagging along.
In August of 2005, we caught up on Lost through reruns (Passive). In September, we continued to catch up through the DVD release (On-Demand). And we did this so that, by the time September 21 rolled around and Season 2 premiered, we could take in Lost the way it was meant to be taken in (Appointment).
And boy, did we dive in. We all did. Some of you were there for it.
June 14, 1995
If December of 1991 was my first taste of MST3K, the Summer of 1995 was when it turned into a full-blown addiction. Now I had people to watch it with. Kind of.
It should be no surprise that MST3K fans were early adopters of the…how should I put this…online lifestyle? By the time I first started chatting with these folks on AOL, Usenet newsgroups had already been created and a digital fandom established. When MST3K told us to “Keep Circulating the Tapes,” these were the dorks that adhered to the mission statement and were doing the circulating, and now they had an instant network by which to do so.
By ‘95, I was able to watch an episode, hop online immediately afterward and chat with a TV Glow-esque secret club of tape traders about how much we liked it. This was the Appointment Television of 30 years ago mixed with the most-futuristic method of communication the world had ever seen. It was the feeling of doing all these things I had never done before, all at once. Suddenly every night could be December of 1991.
From June 14 to September 2 of 1995, Comedy Central aired the top 60 MST3K episodes of all-time (a fan vote sponsored by Fruitopia that ended up being only 56 episodes because Basic Cable was chill as shit and it was the 90’s and nobody cared). This was also the Summer that I stopped sleeping altogether because I was tape recording episodes every night. Not just for me, but for anyone else who wanted them. I did this until the show went off the air (not the first time and not the last time) in 1999.
If you wanted to salvage something from becoming nothing more than ephemera, you had to love it. Truly and wholeheartedly. For better or for worse. And you had to have someone to love it with.
May 28, 2010
I wrote my first Lost episode review in September of 2005. I wrote my 90th Lost episode review in May of 2010.
When my original page shut down in December of 2019 and stopped tracking statistics, my “Lost Friday” reviews had been read over two million times. You were probably one of them.
When I told you I dove in, I meant it. Shortly after a weekly episode of Lost ended on Wednesday night, I’d take a few notes and go to bed. I’d write as much as I could on Thursday (at work) so I’d have something for the Missus to edit when I got home. She’d sign off on the first draft at about 6pm on Thursday, to which I’d then walk away from it until about 10 when I’d go over the text one more time.
At about 10:30pm, I would then scour hundreds of screenshots of the episode on various websites, saving any and every image I could conceivably make fun of. I would normally look at about 500 screenshots a week and end up using 10-15 of them for each episode review. At this point, it would be about quarter-to-12 and I’d be trying hard to stay awake and get everything ready for my self-imposed midnight deadline.
At 12:01am on Friday morning, I’d hit the publish button and go to sleep. A typical episode review was anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words each week, which is up to 16 pages of material. Considering that my timeframe to write was never more than 5 hours max, you’ll forgive me for walking you through the process a bit after writing nearly 100 of them. I’m proud of it. I loved it. Truly and wholeheartedly. Because I had someone to love it with.
Just as Appointment Television was supposed to be dead. Just as the DVR Era was ushered in with the assumption that nobody would miss the communal feeling of watching something at the same time as someone else. Lost popped in and allowed me to Appointment Blog with all of you; something I had wanted to do since the MST3K AOL days of 1994.
It’s a good memory. I like remembering it.
August 15, 2024
This is all about a feeling. And I certainly hope it’s about something, right?
Whether I’m alone in my home theater in 2024, or paying long-distance to chat with strangers on AOL in 1995, or curling up with my newly-wed wife in our new apartment in 2005, or blogging my poop jokes to a couple million people in 2010, or laying in a sleeping bag on the best day of my life in 1991, the feeling is the same.
I Saw The TV Glow can be viewed as an anti-nostalgia piece. A stern reminder that the old days weren’t always as good as you may remember them. I’m no stranger or critic of this stance, it was essentially the mission statement of this entire page. Nostalgia is a drug. Nostalgia can heighten experiences and it can ruin futures. Nostalgia can flood you with euphoria and it can stunt growth. Nostalgia is not a world you can decide to live in permanently without irreparable damage. It’s fun to dabble, but it’s not reality. "Everything used to be better" is just one click away from "Nothing will ever be good again," and that’s no way to live.
But sometimes it’s nice to go back, if only for a little while. Come with me.
See you on 8/15.