PEN15

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s sweet, sincere, yet unafraid to go big. Most of them land, but perhaps the greater accomplishment is showing just how many more strange, funny, and honest teenage stories are worth telling.

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.

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.

It’s not a show that you’ll immediately take to social media to discuss with countless other people. But in its own, completely different way, it will make you feel less alone.

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.

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.

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.

The two are great actresses--no matter how old--who can slip into another bracket and tell universal truths. PEN15 has more humor than you can imagine (wait until you see them in physical education classes) and a voice that deserves to be heard.

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]

PEN15 feels like an experiment that proves reasonably successful and probably shouldn't be repeated -- a sketch stretched to its limit, which would only be marred by trying to put a "2" on the end of it.

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.

[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.