The Big Picture
- Pen15 is a hilarious and heartfelt cringe comedy that accurately captures the awkwardness of adolescence.
- The show's use of adult actors playing 13-year-old versions of themselves adds a comedic dissonance that highlights the characters' struggle to fit in.
- Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle deliver incredible performances that seamlessly transition between comedy and drama, making Pen15 one of the best comedy shows in recent years.
Maya Erskine is the moment. Sure, the expression may seem like an exaggeration when used to refer to anyone with less star power than the likes of Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, but there’s really no other way to describe the current streak of success in the actress’ life. After voicing protagonist Mizu in the critically acclaimed Netflix animated series Blue Eye Samurai, Erskine is, alongside Donald Glover, the big star of Prime Video’s newest action bet, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Delivering equally complex and charismatic performances in both roles, she has been gaining some much deserved traction after years of smaller parts in animated and live-action series ranging from Insecure to Bob’s Burgers and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Perhaps it is time for us to give the proper recognition to Erskine’s main pet project, a project that is completely unlike anything else we have seen on TV so far. It is time for viewers to go back in time a few years and embrace the beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking show that is Pen15.
PEN15
TV-MAComedy Release Date February 8, 2019 Cast Maya Erskine , Anna Konkle , Melora Walters , Mutsuko Erskine Main Genre Comedy Seasons 2What Is ‘Pen15’ About?
Created by Erskine, Anna Konkle, and Sam Zvibleman, Pen15 is, as its genitalia-sounding name suggests, a cringe comedy series about the often traumatic experience that is going through early adolescence. There is really nothing worse than those awful, pimple-ridden teenage years — nothing worse than experiencing the initial pangs of puberty when you are considered, for all intents and purposes, a child. The Emmy-nominated series garned a cult following when it premiered in 2019, but the series never became as ubiquitous and game-changing as it deserved to be. Now that Erskine’s name is at the top of everyone’s minds, we’ve got a brand-new opportunity to correct this mistake.
Pen15 stars two of its creators, Erskine and Konkle, as middle schoolers Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone. Based on the actresses/writers’ real life experiences, the show follows its protagonists as they go through their daily lives as the weirdos in their classroom, with Maya even being dubbed her year’s UGIS, or Ugliest Girl in School. Constantly at each other’s side, the girls come up against common (and yet extremely difficult) challenges of this time of life, from having their parents divorce to learning about sexual urges.
'Pen15' Is Refreshingly Honest
CloseUnlike in your run-of-the-mill teen sitcom, the more adult-oriented Pen15 doesn't offer easy answers to questions such as “what is going on with my body?” and “what are these feelings I’ve never experienced?” The goal is to represent the initial stages of adolescence as close to the real deal as possible, embracing the audience in all the beauty and the ugliness, the ridiculous and the hurtful, that permeate this utterly awkward part of life. In order to highlight said awkwardness, Erskine and Konkle use their own bodies as a narrative tool. Well in their 30s, both actresses play versions of themselves at 13 years old, surrounded by an otherwise entirely age-appropriate cast. This creates an intense dissonance.
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Our suspension of disbelief is initially pushed to the limit as we are asked to believe that Maya and Anna are indeed the same age as their classmates. Add to that the fact that the show makes no effort to hide its protagonists’ real age under layers of makeup or CGI, and the initial effect that the show has on us is intensely comical: we laugh at the ridiculousness of being told these fully grown women are barely two digits old. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that this bizarre discrepancy between the performers’ real ages and that of their characters serves the purpose of highlighting just how out of place Maya and Anna feel in their own bodies, fumbling to find their place as their perception of themselves is constantly at odds with how the world sees them. They feel as if they are practically grown-ups, and yet they are children.
‘Pen15’ Lets Its Leads Show Off Their Acting Range
Over the course of Pen15’s 25 episodes, including an animated special, we become convinced that Anna and Maya, as played by Konkle and Erskine, are indeed 13-year-olds. This is all thanks to the work of the two performers. Erskine and Konkle completely embrace their fictional age, embodying their characters in a way that everything that they do and say screams middle school instead of adulthood. It is acting with a capital A. The actresses don’t need a single ounce of foundation to make us believe that they are who they claim to be, and this offers Erskine and Konkle the perfect opportunity to show everyone just how much they are capable of.
This is even more remarkable when the show leaves comedy territory to veer into drama, something that happens way more often than the first couple of episodes would suggest. One would expect that, when faced with more serious material, Erskine and Konkle would find themselves struggling to keep their 13-year-old personas believable, but the actresses don’t miss a beat. Knowing full well that viewers have already bought them as kids, they are not afraid of turning in some of the most heartbreaking performances ever seen on TV.
Pen15 also allows its stars to show their talent on the other side of the camera. Konkle directs two episodes for the show in Season 2, “Luminaria” and the animated special “Jacuzzi," that deals with the immediate aftermath of Anna’s parents’ divorce. Erskine, in turn, is the one responsible for “Yuki," a beautiful, minimalist exploration of the life and the feelings of Yuki Ishii-Peters, Maya’s mom, who is played by none other than Erskine’s own mother, Mutsuko Erskine.
Maya Erskine's 'Pen15' Performance Is Vulnerable and Dynamic
Erskine, in particular, is remarkable in Pen 15's Season 2 episodes “Opening Night” and “Home." In the first one, Maya stars brilliantly in the school play while her first romantic relationship crumbles before her eyes as her boyfriend and co-star, Gabe (Dylan Gage), begins to come to terms with the fact that he might actually like other boys. On stage, Maya delivers an amazing performance as a grown woman coping with lost love, and Erskine puts on layer upon layer of acting to make us forget that she is actually an adult playing another adult. From the get-go, we accept that Maya is indeed a young teen who is just extremely skilled as an actress. Her performance is beautiful and so at odds with the quiet immaturity with which she deals with her break-up with Gabe that we can’t help but marvel at the range shown by Erskine.
Meanwhile, in “Home," Maya agrees to perform oral sex on her new, older boyfriend, Derrick (Bill Kottkamp), who treats her like crap and clearly fetishizes her due to her partly Japanese ethnicity. Soon after, Maya is dumped over the phone. This episode, the show’s finale, is a painful watch from beginning to end. There isn’t even one second of reprieve in it, apart from the very ending in which Maya finally finds the love that she was looking for. And what makes it so gut-wrenching is precisely how much we have come to believe that Maya is indeed a teen.
‘Pen15’ Is as Funny as It Is Heartfelt
It is, however, easy to look at the more dramatic episodes of Pen15 and recognize their performances as powerful. We are, in general, conditioned to see drama as a more serious and respectable genre, and thus we frequently attribute greater value to drama actors when comparing them with comedians. This is, of course, a mistake. Good comedy is incredibly hard to pull off, and Erskine and Konkle manage to make us laugh until it hurts with their portrayal of life in the early stages of puberty, creating what is easily one of the best comedy shows of the past few years. And it’s not just through the dissonance between their appearance and their characters’ age that they achieve this effect (though there is, of course, something funny about a 30-something woman yelling like a spoiled child “Shuji, get off AOL!”), it is also through their complete embodiment of their characters.
Again, in an episode such as “Community Service," in which Maya and Anna steal one of their more popular classmate’s thongs and become obsessed with it, it is only because we believe them to be 13 that we laugh at their hijinks. It’s not (just) because it is ridiculous for two adult women to be slapping their own butts hidden in their bedrooms as if they had never seen a pair of sexy panties before that we laugh, but because we see versions of ourselves in Maya and Anna and have no choice but to let ourselves go in the face of how absurd our own memories are. Likewise, it is because we remember our own troubled sexual beginnings that, in “Ojichan," we laugh as Maya becomes obsessed with masturbating, but grows worried that her grandfather’s ghost might be watching her as she pleasures herself.
There’s a lot of nostalgia at play in how we watch Pen15. Taking place in the early 2000s, the series begs its viewers to do as Erskine and Konkle, and completely transpose themselves to their past, living it all over again, now in the bodies of adults. Pen15 is a charming, funny, sad, and, most of all, realistic portrayal of adolescence, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before or since.
Pen15 is available to stream on Hulu in the U.S
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