Jane Schoenbrun's "Public Access Afterworld"

About this episode

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, the writer and director behind Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun discusses their debut novel, Public Access Afterworld, a propulsive blend of conspiracy theory, sci-fi, mystery, and early internet nostalgia. The book opens with two teenagers encountering a mysterious transmission coming through the TV static just after broadcast has switched from analog to digital. When one of the teens disappears and the other is suspected of murder, their lives become entangled with a range of characters across decades, all intersecting with a strange alternate dimension lurking on the other side of the TV screen. Schoenbrun discusses the creative possibilities they found in fiction, their ambivalent sense of media as both refuge and threat, liminality and nostalgia, and how they've been writing TV shows in their mind since childhood.