TV static and the quiet alienation of digital life—this is the space where Jane Schoenbrun thrives. The director of I Saw the TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma makes their first foray into the world of fiction with their debut novel, Public Access Afterworld. An urban legend is born on the airwaves after a weatherman takes his own life during a broadcast, only to be rediscovered 30 years later by two bored outcasts in a suburban basement at the outset of the digital era.
My TV show starts nine feet under the American suburbs, in Erin Morrison’s basement.
That basement was a refuge. A nook to hide from the town above. Waste your youth watching horror movies and weird early internet videos. A cocoon without windows, incubated by central air.
My TV show starts on Friday, June 12, 2009, the night of the analog-to-digital switch-off. Maybe that date doesn’t mean anything to you, but if your high school experience was anything like mine, you probably remember the legally mandated deadline when every television network in America, be it local or national, was required to flip the switch and put analog broadcasting out of its misery forever. David Sawyer and Erin Morrison had been quietly anticipating the deadline all school year long. They were, of course, losers.
It had all been a long time coming. Analog broadcasting had spent at least a decade in the TV equivalent of hospice, and during that time, houses all over town had been leveling up to flat-screens and TiVos, banishing their old bulky sets to collect dust in attics and basements. Digital television was the future. It meant more channels, crisper picture quality. Analog television meant fuzzy images and… I don’t know, Dick Van Dyke reruns? Maybe back in the 1950s, all that had been a necessary stepping stone, but now analog was a relic, one whose government-mandated extinction date was way past due.
For David and Erin, the switch-off was an excuse for celebration. The best friends stayed up late that night, throwing themselves a two-person kegger in the basement with a bottle of Tito’s they “borrowed” from Erin’s mom’s liquor cabinet. As the hour approached, they traded swigs, passing the bottle back and forth from beanbag to couch, waiting for analog broadcasting to end and the digital era to begin. That’s what they would say on the news later that night (for the very first time broadcast exclusively over cable boxes and digital receivers): “The digital era has begun.”
Around eleven-thirty, David stumbled to his feet and got to work setting up his Canon VIXIA. He fiddled with the tripod, trying to get the framing just right so he could capture the exact moment in history when some Cronkite-style newsman, nearly extinct himself, in some television studio somewhere, flipped the switch and transitioned eighty years of television back to that which came before it: static.
Never-ending static. Fuzzy and numbing.
Keep your eye on the static: It’s an important part of my TV show’s mythology.
David loved Erin’s basement. You could call it his second home, but that would be giving too much credit to his first. To David, Erin’s basement was a sanctuary. Its lava lamps and glow-in-the-dark alien smoking weed posters from Spencer Gifts. That “I Love NYC” snow globe on the mantel that Erin brought back from a school trip to the city at the end of the third grade, just months before 9/11 rendered its miniature skyline as outdated as the analog signal David and Erin were tuning in to for the very last time.
A short list of things David loved: Erin’s basement, which we’ve already covered. Television, obviously. Blockbuster, before it closed. Ms. Walsh’s AV dungeon and the Auxiliaries who spent their time down there. Reading the plots of horror movies on Wikipedia without ever watching them. Double Stuf Oreos (David liked to combine the frosted halves of two to make a custom sandwich he dubbed the Quadruple Stuf Oreo).
And Erin. There was no one and nothing in this world David loved more than Erin Morrison, not even television. Erin, that anxious, mousy girl who’d first talked to him in the cafeteria back in fourth grade because they were reading the same Animorphs book. Erin, whom David had started having weekly playdates with before elementary school was over, even though both their moms were clearly uncomfortable with them being coed best friends.
And okay, look: Yes. If you need to know, David was utterly, totally, one hundred percent madly in love with Erin. Obviously. Always had been. Always would be.
David loved Erin. David loved watching TV with Erin down in her basement. And David knew without a doubt in his mind that before too long, Erin was going to leave him.
“Okay, it’s…” David checks his watch. He grins at his camcorder, standing in front of Erin’s old Toshiba.
“It’s 11:58 p.m., June twelfth, 2009. And this is the biggest moment in television history since the Man on the Moon. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Or when JFK got shot by someone who was definitely not Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“It’s the end of analog broadcasting,” Erin says from behind the camera.
“It’s over, baby! RIP!” David shouts.
Erin smiles, watching her best friend from the beanbag and beaming like a proud parent at a school play. David checks his watch.
“In just one minute and eleven seconds, Uncle Sam is gonna flip the switch, and eighty years of television history is going to go up in static. And the last thing ever broadcast on analog television was…” David looks behind him. “Sex and the fucking City. The lamest show ever!” On the screen, the Sex and the City credits begin to scroll faster than anyone could possibly read.
Now midnight approaches. David checks his watch again and hams a countdown for the camera like it’s New Year’s Eve and he’s a young, lactose intolerant Dick Clark.
“All right. In EIGHT. SEVEN. SIX…”
From her spot on the beanbag, Erin joins in on the count.
“FIVE. FOUR. THREE.
“TWO.
“ONE.”
They don’t hit the mark exactly. Maybe David’s watch is a little off. Or maybe that decrepit Cronkite in his radio tower flips the switch a second or two past midnight. But who cares? Because even though it happens a moment later than it’s supposed to, it still happens.
TSSSSSSSSSSSS—
Static. Without warning. A signal washed of its image. A transmission cut with the abruptness of lightning.
TSSSSSSSSSS. The static hisses from its boxed enclosure. Vibrates against the glass of Erin’s newly useless Toshiba.
Do you know what static is, literally? Radio waves. Invisible to our sense perceptions, but surrounding us at all times, like water we don’t even know we’re swimming in. For centuries, millennia, since before the Big Bang, we didn’t know these waves existed. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t there, waiting to be discovered.
And then about a century ago, we tuned in. We learned how to recognize those waves, to conjure them onto a screen in a digestible form. We tapped the signal, and soon we learned to work with it, to control it, to bend the static to our will.
We made shadows and shapes. Transmissions in color and black and white. The Honeymooners. The Andy Griffith Show. Sex and the fucking City. As the decades passed, we discovered newer, more cost-effective ways to control electricity. To recognize and manipulate that invisible water that surrounds us all. To remake it in our image. So we allowed the analog signal to revert back to its original form: wild, endless static.
It’s still there, of course. Even if our world moves on. Even if we hide our analog sets in storage closets and garbage dumps. The static remains underneath everything.
Eight percent uploaded.
Erin balances her mom’s bottle of Tito’s on her belly, sprawled out on her beanbag still watching the static on her Toshiba. David’s in a leather chair at the computer desk, hunched over Erin’s family desktop, uploading his video to GlobalVill.com, that new streaming platform people say is two times faster than YouTube, better quality than Dailymotion, more community-oriented than Vimeo.
This, too, is another sign of the changing times. The streaming revolution is at hand. It seems like just yesterday it took David forty-five minutes to play a Flash game on his parents’ 56K dial-up, three hours to download a WAV file from LimeWire. But recently, suddenly, streaming video was instantaneous. Anything was ready to watch or upload anytime. Anyone could start a TV channel of their very own.
David’s not the only person racing tonight to upload his documentation of the analog switch-off, not the only loser who’s dedicated his Friday night to playing amateur television historian. But he’s probably the youngest. Some videos are already up on GlobalVill.com. “The Exact Moment that Analog Broadcasting Ended!” uploaded by JakeMonster. “Analog TV is Over You Guys!” uploaded by triggerhappyninja. David’s been scooped, beaten to the punch thanks to Erin’s mediocre DSL connection.
Nine percent. The upload stutters along.
“I switched your settings off Energy Saver,” David tells Erin. He stumbles across the room, scoops up his cellphone, then grabs his house keys from next to that Twin Tower snow globe up on the mantel.
“I’m okay to bike. I think I’m okay to bike.”
“It’s one a.m.,” Erin says. “Crash on the couch. Mom can make us waffles in the morning.”
David looks towards the staircase and thinks about emerging out of air-conditioning into the swamp outside. A minor bout of vertigo wobbles him.
Erin rolls her eyes. “You’re drunk,” she says. Static hums from the screen across the room.
“Okay. Yeah. I am.” David stumbles over to the beanbag and collapses next to Erin. It’s not his usual sleep spot. David knows he should get up and sprawl out on that couch he’s crashed on countless nights before. He knows this beanbag hardly sleeps a cat, let alone two drunk teenagers.
But he doesn’t want to move. Why should he sleep on Erin’s couch when this warm body is right here next to him? When he could drift off to sleep listening to his best friend breathing just inches away, feeling her body stretch and resettle on the fabric they’re now sharing?
Maybe Erin’s surprised at David’s boldness, or maybe she’s too drunk to notice. Either way, she just nuzzles into the beanbag, moving a little closer to him. And then she asks the question she always asks at the end of nights like this one.
“Hey. What do you think TV will be like in one hundred years?”
David smiles. It’s a game they play. Another ritual they share. And of course David’s got his answer memorized, like the first page of a prayer book to his own personal religion.
“Oh my gosh. It won’t even look like television.”
Erin nuzzles in closer. She closes her eyes. David can feel her breath on his neck.
“Well, first of all, it’ll be beamed directly to a chip in your brain. Or to, like, nanobots. But the point is, there won’t even be a screen.”
“No screen,” Erin says. “Check.”
“And every show will star whoever you want it to. Like next week, if you want your mom to play Marge Simpson on The Simpsons—”
“Then my mom will play Marge Simpson on The Simpsons.”
“And shows never have to end,” David tells her. “Unless we want them to. No more cancelations or series finales. We’ll be able to live in our favorite shows for as long or as short as we—”
It happens effortlessly, as if in that moment it just makes more sense for David’s and Erin’s lips to join together than remain apart. The kiss feels warm and wet and soft, as fuzzy and blanketing as the static still blaring from Erin’s TV across the room.
And now David and Erin’s bedtime routine is broken, probably forever. Because Erin isn’t just listening to David’s drunken bedtime story like she always does on nights like this one. She’s kissing him. The two of them are kissing. Right now.
And it’s so easy. David feels like a puppet, drunk on Tito’s, the inebriation providing him cover to finally fall into this moment he’s dreamed about ever since he first laid eyes on Erin Morrison and her Animorphs novel half a lifetime ago.
Or maybe it’s something else. Not the Tito’s. Maybe it’s the static pulling his strings, humming him towards this moment that now seems inevitable, crazy, actually, that it took so many years to arrive. The utter obviousness of kissing your best friend on a beanbag in a basement in your shitty hometown on a Friday night near the end of junior year. Everything’s changed now. Analog television is over. Static reigns.
The kiss lasts fourteen seconds, maybe fifteen, before David chickens out.
“I’m sorry,” he says as he pulls away. “I just—we just—it’s not that I don’t want to…”
Erin looks at her best friend with sympathy, but not surprise. David jumps off the beanbag. “That was a big deal,” he says.
“And this…” He looks at the glowing television, then at the computer desk. Anywhere but at Erin. “I’m really drunk.”
“I thought you wanted to?” Erin asks.
“I did. I do. I just—” David grabs his flip phone. “I’ve gotta go. I think I’m okay to bike…”
Erin doesn’t move from the beanbag. David runs up the stairs in panicked retreat.
“I’ll see you in school Monday, okay?” He doesn’t wait for Erin’s response. He’s out the door, and then Erin’s alone, totally humiliated.
The static continues to hum, like it’s whispering to her.
Out on the street, David plays it back in his head. They kissed. He can still taste it, can still feel it. His first kiss actually just happened. He and Erin will never exist in a reality where they’ve never kissed ever again.
God. He’s such a fucking loser. Why couldn’t he be present then, even then, in that moment he’d fantasized about for years?
David’s not ready to bike across town yet, not ready to slip into his house, check the internet, masturbate, and probably stay up all night in bed stewing in the overwhelming humiliation of that kiss. No. David just wants to stand here, hugged by the humidity of the suburbs, ashamed by his inability to be like the other teenagers in this town who don’t retreat in terror when a girl they like kisses them.
He feels the urge to rush back down to the basement and tell Erin everything he’s feeling. He should go back inside. Erin’s still awake. She wants him to come back.
But he doesn’t. Of course not. David bikes home. He checks the internet. He masturbates. He spends the night awake in his childhood bed, marinating in his utter cowardice. The digital era begins.
And that next Monday, after David spends a full weekend overthinking how he’ll greet Erin in Ms. Walsh’s AV dungeon before first period, how he’ll be casual and friendly, give off the calming impression that nothing has changed between them in hopes that things will continue to do exactly that, David will discover that, actually, Erin isn’t waiting for him in her usual spot by the slide projectors.
In fact, Erin will never show up to school on Monday at all. She won’t call out sick, and none of her other friends will have heard from her since Friday night
And then, things will get even stranger.
You see, ever since he was a child, David Sawyer had wished his life could feel more like a TV show. After the night of the analog-to-digital switch-off, it finally became one.
From the book PUBLIC ACCESS AFTERWORLD by Jane Schoenbrun. Copyright © 2026 by Jane Schoenbrun. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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