Screened at Eastern Edge as part of Lawnya Vawnya 15, and born out of adoration for good ol’ cable television, HOME TV, is an imaginative DIY film project from Montreal filmmaker Alex Apostolidis, known professionally as iWant2BeOnTV. With “HOME TV,” Apostolidis conceptualizes a queer, anti-capitalist, and fantastically satirical utopian future of television, free from the ruling of large corporations, profit–seeking streaming services, and crushing cis-heteronormativity.
HOME TV is a wonderfully chaotic spliced-together series of bits film from 2019-2024, and with hilarious pieces like: a politically cognizant newsroom satire; a sitcom-like bit about frat boys participating in a ridiculous “No Pee November” challenge; a relatably awkward interview-based talk show; a spirited hot dog eating contest; a section parodying kids’ shows about toys unionizing; a queer online dating show; MTV-like music videos; and a shopping channel called “Kijiji Tviji.”
iWant2BeOnTV’s film is all-encompassing, emulating lazily flicking through TV channels in the era before Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ reigned supreme.
Many parts of HOME TV draw on the freaky uncanniness of television from the 80s-early 2000s. This film is a thoughtfully contemporary iteration on lost media from your youth that you can’t quite remember if it was real.
Though the project consists of pieces recorded over 5 years, concluding production in 2024, it reminds me of Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 film I Saw The TV Glow, a personal favourite of mine. It is fiercely queer, delightfully weird, and has all those rough around the edges quirks of punk music and indie cinema, especially present satire and horror, that closely border the line between unsettling and profoundly poetic.
Watching this felt like falling asleep in front of the TV and waking up at 3am to charming ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ horrors with unfortunate green screen work, unseen during the daytime hours. HOME TV is odd, for sure, it’s evidently not for everyone, but it leans into satire in such a clever way, that if you’re iWant2BeOnTv’s target audience, you’ll absolutely love it.
My personal rating of this, to use a 5-star scale à la Letterboxd style, would be around a 3/5. This is simply because some of the bits felt a little drawn out, which may be due to some of the features being filmed solely online over quarantine, or written by a collective of people.
The project as a whole would have packed a bigger punch if it was a bit shorter, creating more impactful, airtight bits and avoiding instilling needless discomfort in the viewer. I found a few of the characters also crossed over from silly satire to caricatures, and I’m unsure if this was intentional or not, but despite it all – HOME TV is a very fun and downright cool project. The creator cited John Waters as a source of inspiration and that undoubtedly comes through in this film.
Perhaps I’m biased as a media studies student, but iWant2BeOnTV’s concept of an imagined utopia democratizing creativity and making, and their proposed renaissance of broadcast television, queered to hell and back, is irresistibly alluring – a world I’d like to live in for sure.