Imagine a world that exists beyond the television. A dimension where everyone is a patient in a psychiatric facility and their “treatment” is creating our television shows. They dream up the characters, the sets, the storylines, then beam the images across the multiverse and into our laptops without a single actor or gaffer attached to the project. It’s all invented, the product of one mind, one body. Now imagine that the U.S. government knows about this parallel dimension (has known about it since the Chicago Project, the lesser-known sister of the Manhattan Project), and the grandson of the scientist in charge of the Chicago Project is now a tech billionaire willing to do anything to help this bizarre hospital dimension identify and kidnap new patients. It sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone (or the reality-shattering eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return), but it’s actually the premise of Public Access Afterworld, the debut novel of auteur Jane Schoenbrun.
In interviews and public statements, Schoenbrun has positioned Public Access Afterworld as the final part of the “screen trilogy” that began with their first two feature films, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow (their most recent film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is not considered part of the trilogy). For fans already familiar with Schoenbrun’s œuvre thus far, the thematic connections will be clear: the frightening allure of the screen, the perpetual questions of what is real, who is real, and whether we have control over our own stories.
In the novel’s prologue, the unnamed first-person narrator explains, “This book is not my own.” It is, itself, a TV show, recounted episode by episode by a friend they met when they were both patients in a psychiatric facility. This friend had suffered a breakdown because of the “fake” TV show and needed to get it out of their head, and the narrator is writing it all down now because they need to get it out of their head, too. Everything that follows is a show about a dimension where people create shows, a meta-metanarrative about who gets to be heroes and the nature of storytelling itself.
So it’s no surprise that the main characters of “Episode One: The Future of Television” are obsessed with media. When we first meet Erin Morrison and David Sawyer, they are hanging out in Erin’s basement. It’s June 12, 2009, the night of the switch-off from analog to digital broadcasting. Midnight comes, alcohol flows, and then they’re kissing for the first time. It gets awkward, as it so often does for teenagers. Only after does Erin see it: the image under the static. Public Access Afterworld. It’s reaching for her. Eventually, she gets sucked into that other dimension and disappears into the television static.
If the premise sounds familiar, like a blip of cinematic déjà vu, it’s because it bears a resemblance to the plot of I Saw the TV Glow, in which two teenagers, Owen and Maddy, form a connection with a show called The Pink Opaque, which they watch every week in Maddy’s basement—that is, until she disappears. Unlike Maddy, who returns years later with startling revelations, Erin is presumed dead, and people think David killed her. He knows she’s still alive inside the static. In his quest to find her and uncover the truth about Public Access Afterworld, he becomes a cult leader, and all the similarities with his I Saw the TV Glow counterpart start to fade as he becomes a different kind of character.
Schoenbrun’s reimagining of their own creative past doesn’t stop there. In “Episode Two: The Receiver,” they introduce Jules Estrada, a nonbinary mini-golf attendant uploading videos of themself to GlobalVill (the novel’s analog for YouTube) in their quest to join the inner circle of David’s cult. The videos are disturbing, full of simulated self-harm and cries for help—not unlike those recorded by Casey, the protagonist of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. In the film, the World’s Fair is a mythical place accessible only after completing an online challenge that involves recording oneself undergoing physical and psychological changes. It’s meant to be unclear if such experiences are real, performed to keep the myth alive, or symptoms of an emerging psychosis (or all of the above). In Jules Estrada’s case, however, it’s clear from the start that they’re pretending. Most of the people trying to join David’s cult are. But the symptoms David is trying to induce are very real.
When a character begins to feel an uncanny connection to Public Access Afterworld, they develop what’s called “Screen Sickness.” Symptoms can include anxiety, difficulty sleeping, audio and visual hallucinations, and, in its most advanced stage, entrance to The Video Store, a kind of interdimensional nexus between the “real” world and Public Access Afterworld. When characters start to see The Video Store, their abduction is near. Then the Static People appear in their fields of vision to escort them to the other world.
While reading, I imagined the Static People as chaotic scrawls in the salt-and-pepper colors of old-school television snow, but one could also picture them as the black-and-white bit characters in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Though Schoenbrun’s latest film is not technically part of the “screen trilogy,” there is a significant similarity: that hole in the bottom of the lake “where the movies come from” in Camp Miasma leads to a kind of pocket dimension one could compare to Public Access Afterworld, the place where the TV shows come from (although Public Access Afterworld is far less liberatory and more densely populated). Given the proximity of the novel and film releases, it’s likely that the projects cross-pollinated, giving Schoenbrun a chance to explore an idea in multiple mediums.
What are we to make of all this self-referentiality? Amid the Easter Egg-ification of mass media, in which an entire subset of the social media experience is dedicated to identifying Easter Eggs and pointing out how cool they are, it’s easy for nods to other films or even one’s own work to feel like fan service, a bit of pandering to an audience being trained to look for hidden clues so they will ignore the essential shallowness of the surrounding narrative. Often, these references or nods serve no real purpose other than to be fun details that super-fans notice or interesting pieces of trivia.
My favorite Easter Eggs add texture and emotional resonance even when viewers don’t get the reference. Take the Easter Eggs in 8 Women by François Ozon, for example. This farcical French murder mystery was inspired by filmmaker Douglas Sirk, whose films Ozon references in multiple ways: a supersaturated color palette reminiscent of Technicolor, the framing of a fawn in the window as in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, and so on. Taken together, these situate the film squarely within the tradition of Sirkian melodrama. Yet the best Easter Egg of the film, in my mind, is when Catherine Deneuve’s character says that being reminded of her dead lover is “une joie et une souffrance” (meaning “it’s a joy and a source of suffering”). This quote is from François Truffaut’s The Last Metro, which also stars Catherine Deneuve. After she repeats it in 8 Women, the camera cuts to the grief-stricken face of Fanny Ardant, Truffaut’s partner at the time of his death and the mother of one of his children. The moment breaks the fourth wall and invites viewers to share in a collective grief over the loss of one of cinema’s great auteurs.
One could argue that Schoenbrun’s self-referentiality is meant to break that fourth wall, pointing back to where they came from even as they direct readers toward where they’re going. If their first two films are allegories for the “egg crack,” or the moment someone comes out of their shell and admits they’re trans, then Public Access Afterworld is Schoenbrun’s examination of life after the crack. Its true hero is not David or Erin or even Jules but Bethany Peters, a trans woman in Texas.
When we first meet Bethany in Episode Two, she’s estranged from her parents, living with a sugar daddy boyfriend, and struggling to find gainful work in a state increasingly hostile to trans people. Her best option is a night job as a content moderator for GlobalVill, where she reviews a constant stream of some of the most disturbing content on the internet—including Jules Estrada’s videos, which help induce Bethany’s Screen Sickness.
Due to her past mental health struggles, as well as her experiences in a psychiatric facility, she assumes her symptoms are stress-related, but in fact she is being targeted by the CEO of GlobalVill, the tech billionaire helping Public Access Afterworld abduct its patients. The billionaire CEO is secretly dosing her with psychedelics as an experiment—a sentence that would have sounded like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist only a decade ago but now seems all too plausible, given the state of the world today. I wish we lived in a world where trans women like Bethany were free to live their best, most fulfilling lives without fear of losing rights or being targeted by the richest men in the world.
To make a trans woman the hero in this day and age is, in itself, a powerful statement. To make her the key to unlocking the mysteries of Public Access Afterworld, rescuing Erin and their fellow patients, and changing reality as we know it is to defy all the forces that have tried to limit trans people to only very specific stories. For so long, trans people have been slapped with labels like “victim” or “predator” or “freak” and relegated to the fringes of society while cis lawmakers try to regulate them out of existence. When Bethany fights back against the forces of GlobalVill and Public Access Afterworld, Schoenbrun is attempting to seize control over all these narratives and put them in a trans woman’s hands. What would television shows look like if a trans person had total authority over every aspect of them, including the power to destroy the medium itself? What would trans storytelling be if it broke through the screen, cast off its shell, and emerged as its fully realized self?
Public Access Afterworld ends without answering that question, and it’s unclear whether the show that is the novel will get a season two. But I, for one, will be tuning in to see whatever Schoenbrun does next.
FICTION
By Jane Schoenbrun
Hogarth
Published October 27, 2026
