Beyond Buffy: I Saw The TV Glow channels the melancholy magic of The Adventures Of Pete & Pete

Most of the surface-level conversation surrounding Jane Schoenbrun’s brilliantly dark, existentially heartbreaking horror film I Saw The TV Glow has been around the similarities between its central piece of pop culture obsession and one particular TV touchstone: Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And that’s completely fair, since The Pink Opaque, the fictional cult TV show that fascinates main characters Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine), contains multiple signifiers that situate it firmly in Buffy Land: Kickass female protagonists, a split between “myth” episodes and more typical monster-of-the-week fare, and even references to a Bronze-esque venue that its teen heroes cool down at after a night of monster slaying. (A cameo appearance by Buffy favorite Amber Benson only solidifies the intent.)

But the Buffy parallels are only half the story of the homage game that Schoenbrun is playing with their film, as they lure Owen and Maddy deeper toward whatever it is that The Pink Opaque is trying to tell them. After all, the mapping isn’t perfect: Despite its late-night timeslot, The Pink Opaque is on a Nickelodeon-esque kids network, not a hip network for young adults—and is generally derided a bit for being for the younger crowd. The monster designs are goofier than what Buffy typically managed (if no less horrifying for it). And, maybe most importantly, there’s a sort of magical (sur)realism that hangs over the whole thing, in opposition to Buffy’s central trick of making killing vampires and fighting demons just another part of the mundane drag of high school life. As with their references to Joss Whedon’s series, though, Schoenbrun underscores where they’re actually pulling the other half of The Pink Opaque from with another cameo (even if we didn’t actually recognize it at the time, because verily, time makes fools of us all): Late-film, wordless appearances from Danny Tamberelli and Michael Maronna, stars of Nickelodeon’s The Adventures Of Pete And Pete.

Once you see Pete And Pete in The Pink Opaque, you can’t un-see it: One of the only monsters we ever see from the show-within-a-show is almost actionably a horror-movie version of ice cream mascot Mr. Tastee, while many of the angles and shots we see of tween protagonists Tara and Isabel could have been pulled straight from Nickelodeon’s cameras.

Most important, though, is the magic. With its story of two teens connecting on an astral plane that looks like a summer camp, while a malevolent man in the moon looks on, The Pink Opaque carries with it the core Pete And Pete ethos: Kids function in a semi-magical, frequently scary world that the adults in their lives are too jaded to notice. It’s fertile soul for two outsiders like Owen and Maddy to lose, or find, themselves within.

There’s a fairly clear way to read I Saw The TV Glow—one explored by this site’s former TV editor, Emily St. James, in a moving essay over at Vulture, and one that Schoenbrun hasn’t been shy about endorsing, either: That Owen’s story in I Saw The TV Glow is about what happens to a trans person when the world makes the prospect of transitioning too terrifying to ever look at straight-on. Maddy, spurred on by the show, spends the whole film trying to encourage Owen to take the leap with her—even if, from a “rational” perspective, said leap looks like an act of profound self-destruction. And The Pink Opaque’s own embrace of magical realism is vital to embracing that mindset, because, like Pete And Pete, it asks the question: What if the world really is as magical and mysterious as it seemed when you were a kid? What if you really could do, be, anything you want?

As a cis man, I can only receive some of this material at a remove—even as Schoenbrun and Smith masterfully convey the sheer claustrophobia that Owen feels inside his own skin as his mundane life races toward what feels more and more like its inevitable conclusion. But I can remember, profoundly, the way Pete And Pete affected me as a kid, the way it made me feel like the world might actually be special in ways adults were continually trying to teach me it wasn’t. (This was also, not coincidentally, the roughly six-month period during which a charismatic friend with a con artist’s touch convinced me that he and I both actually had magical powers, a third-grade delusion I still heard about years later at Thanksgivings, after I brought it up in front of my less-credulous cousins.) Maddie and Owen’s connection over that feeling, which is simultaneously precious, wild, and terrifying, made perfect sense to me. I remember those moments: A blend of folie à deux and pure survival instinct. “Do you feel this? I think I feel this.” “We do.”

The magic of Pete And Pete was always tinged with melancholy—in the memory, it’s a show that seems perpetually set in the fall, the passing of the leaves a reminder that no kid retains, to pick just one example, their childhood superhero forever. Its favorite trick was frequently the contrast between the slightly more regular world occupied by Maronna’s older Pete, and the more mystical one occupied by Tamberelli’s, who seemed capable of manifesting enduring strangeness through sheer self-confidence alone. It’s a show, on some level, about how growing up means the world will try to strip you of your magic—but also about how you don’t have to let it.

For all the ways it twists and turns near its end, the world of I Saw The TV Glow is fundamentally akin to the shadow realm that most of us live in: Owen slips through time in terrifying leaps and starts—in the film’s most darkly comic moment, he swears to the audience that he now has a fantastic family of his own, and isn’t it a shame that they’re always lingering just off-camera—and the world is content to ignore his screams that something inside of him is dying. When he tries to re-watch The Pink Opaque, it looks cheap, childish, and awful. He ends the film literally apologizing for existing.

All of which speaks to why shows like Pete And Pete were so important, especially to kids of the generation Owen (and Schoenbrun) were raised in: The world will never lack for reasons to doubt yourself, to put yourself in a box for easy and convenient disposal. Filling up your resistance against that impulse with a little magic, borrowed from art, is one of the only ways to survive, and to remind yourself that—as the film’s most haunting line reminds us—there is still time.