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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
35
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianJan 4, 2022
Season 2.5 Review:
Its tone is perfectly judged. The show is so pitifully accurate about how cringeworthy teenage life can be that, at times, it is tough to watch. ... I found the very last episode surprisingly upsetting, and wondered if this was really how it would end. And then it pulled out its PEN15 superpower, turned its lights up, and became something touching and brilliant again.
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Dec 6, 2021
Season 2.5 Review:
"PEN15" has been emo rocking its way toward the painful side of the scale to get us to these final episodes which are less funny than they are painful, occasionally shocking and wonderfully genuine. ... There could be no truer way to close the show than the way they do, by landing in a place of resolution as opposed to definitive finality.
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Sep 18, 2020
Season 2 Review:
Its second season (the first seven episodes of which are newly streaming on Hulu) evolves beyond that pretense and looks inward at Maya and Anna. The show becomes more concerned with how strong the bond of friendship can be between young girls, especially as they experience complications on top of what’s already a complicated time of life. And it makes for beautifully relatable stuff, particularly thanks to the show’s increased focus on how puberty strains Maya and Anna’s friendship.
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Sep 17, 2020
Season 2 Review:
Never once, in any episode, is the viewer even temporarily reminded that [Anna and Maya] are adults. Both of them were great in season one, but in this season they have seeped even more deeply into these characters. ... The beauty of PEN15 is that it’s recognizable to everyone because we’ve all been through adolescence. We know how it felt. Sometimes we forget, but PEN15 is here to remind us of every glorious, agonizing, infuriating, beautiful moment.
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Sep 9, 2020
Season 2 Review:
If one has to choose only one millennial-made TV series that ventures into adolescent angst in the AOL era, please make it this one. “PEN15,” which returns Sept. 18 with seven endearing new episodes (another seven will follow when production can safely resume), could be almost considered an act of communal therapy. ... “PEN15” is both an exquisite wallow in hormonal chaos and a belated act of forgiveness.
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The Daily BeastSep 8, 2020
Season 2 Review:
[Pen15 returns] in all its heart-shredding, hormone-confused, beautifully awkward and painfully traumatizing glory. If I had a gel pen, I would be doodling hearts all over. ... None of us would have been capable of writing about what any of that was like when we are at that age. To have it dramatized for us so viscerally—and now, at this turning point in our (millennial) lives—is pretty astonishing.
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Sep 8, 2020
Season 2 Review:
I can't do justice to the vibrant thrill of the central performances. The bond between Maya and Anna feels unspoken and lived-in, full of sentences that trail off into meaningful glances. ... A totally unique combination of dear-diary authenticity, casual dream-state strangeness, and the genuine wonder of kids figuring out that nobody ever really figures themselves out.
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ColliderSep 8, 2020
Season 2 Review:
PEN15 Season 2 is very much worth the binge, as well as the wait for the second half, set to premiere in 2021. ... Erskine and Konkle are true delights and they are surrounded by an equally delightful cast of actual kids who showcase a range of talent that keeps the adult leads of this show on their toes.
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Sep 21, 2020
Feb 12, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The adults’ performances are so committed as to erase the sense of difference. With the precise physicality of their hallway trudges and great shades of meaning in their many outbursts of “Oh, my God!,” the leads balance glorious caricature and subtle evocation. ... Where “Sex Education” offers a lot of easy answers to the embarrassments of puberty, “PEN15” loiters amid its difficult mysteries and discovers an embarrassment of riches.
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Feb 8, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Pen15 flips the adolescent script like this so many times with such clever insight that it can genuinely become disorienting after a lifetime of never seeing anything quite like it onscreen. It feels like watching a show entirely about the “freaks” from “Freaks and Geeks,” except it was explicitly written for and by women.
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Feb 7, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The big innovation in PEN15 is that Anna and Maya’s peers are all played by actual kids, and it’s remarkable to see how Erskine and Konkle blend so easily among them, without the show becoming a prolonged stunt. ... PEN15 is not a sendup so much as a deeply felt and utterly convincing homage to the girls they used to be.
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Feb 5, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It is remarkable how easy it is to forget that Erskine and Konkle aren’t actually kids. ... The most joyful thing in PEN15 is the relationship between Anna and Maya, which is a refreshing testament to the role girls play in propping each other up during a period of life when every rug they’ve ever known is pulled out from under them with little warning.
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Mar 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
But it's the eternal internal world of adolesence that's mostly the concern of Pen15, and that's not always a good fit for nostalgia. Erskine and Konkle do not skip past the mindless cruelty of teenagers, and it's possible that for all its rip-roaring daffiness, Pen15 is at its best when it's most lacerating.
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IndieWireDec 3, 2021
Sep 16, 2020
Season 2 Review:
There's a general sense of growing confidence to all aspects of Pen15, one that makes it justifiable that episodic running times were pushing past 35 minutes by the end of the season. Perhaps you still can't escape defining Pen15 through its core conceit and puerile title, but it's becoming easier and easier to see how the series is becoming.
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The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Erskine and Konkle so convincingly effect the “no duhs” and knee-jerk emotions of the tweener years that I genuinely forgot they were adults for most of the series. ... “You’re my rainbow gel pen in a sea of blue and black writing utensils,” Anna tells Maya by the end of the first episode. It’s an insight into lockstep friendship, one of many joys over of the course of the series.
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Feb 8, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The result is not so much a show for today’s teens, but rather a show for adults to wistfully look back at those years after having experienced every moment of awkwardness, heartbreak, anger, genuine friendship amidst a world of jelly pens, AOL chatrooms, retainers, landlines, and the Pen15 club.
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Feb 7, 2019
Season 1 Review:
What distinguishes the series isn’t the cringe comedy. It’s the immediate sincere-weirdo voice, which powers PEN15 through an uneven but delightfully odd first season. ... When it works, though, it’s an idiosyncratic tribute to friendship at its most possessively intense.
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Feb 6, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Weirdly wonderful. ... All of the other kids in Maya and Anna’s middle school are played by real kids, which makes the pair’s acting feat even more impressive. They pass as 13-year-olds even amid a cohort of the real thing. ... There are countless moments of insight and comedy in the episodes, but they aren’t linked up dynamically. That said, the friendship between Maya and Anna offers a series of ups and downs that, while not particularly twisty, satisfy.
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Feb 6, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The more physically convincing they become, the more emotionally rich and fascinating Pen15 turns out to be. It’s primarily a balls-out, Broad City-ish comedy throughout, but it also evolves to become keenly observant, wise and empathetic regarding the fraught nature of being a friend, a daughter or just a girl of that age.
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Feb 12, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Though some episodes read as millennial nostalgia trips or rehashes of teen tropes, standouts that challenge the best friends' relationship("Ojichan," "Community Service") suggest that this sharp duo has much more to offer. [18-26 Feb 2019, p.108]
Feb 7, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Pen15 is too, uh, long—the premises for the first four episodes in particular could easily been merged into just two installments. It’s at the halfway mark that Pen15 grows into an equally affecting and raunchy coming-of-age story, demonstrating that middle school isn’t any easier to navigate with hindsight.
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Feb 6, 2019
Season 1 Review:
[Erskine and Konkle are] hilarious, and there are moments when you entirely forget they’re adults. And then there are moments when that fact sticks out like a sore thumb and those moments are possibly the best, because they evoke the competing impulses of the age--to race into adulthood and to go back to the safety of childhood—with a kind of zany, surreal brilliance. .... But one gets the sense pretty quickly that these are two gifted performers who haven’t yet experienced enough of their own lives to have a season’s worth of stuff to say.
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Feb 5, 2019
Season 1 Review:
In its best moments, PEN15 is like a juvenile version of Broad City--creatively bold, out there and simple in its directness as it follows two best friends testing the bounds of friendship. ... But the downside is the repetitive sketch feel of the whole thing, which can wear thin over 30 minutes.
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