“The best answer is,” Abad-Santos wrote, “nyone whose childhood consisted of pretending to be a hot 26-year-old with brown hair and blue eyes in an AOL chatroom.”īut that answer doesn’t seem exactly right to me.
Which is why I found myself sometimes wondering, to quote Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos in his review of the show’s first season, “Who is this show truly for?” I consistently cover my mouth with my hands in horrified recognition of what Maya and Anna are going through, more than I do watching any other show. (Never forget that these girls are extreme weirdos.) Everything that Maya and Anna feel is shared between them what continues to glue them together is that they’re never self-conscious with each other, comparing their pubic hair while talking on the phone, or yelling made-up incantations while holding hands in the school greenhouse, or awkwardly taking a joke one step too far and pretending to be a baby and breastfeeding mom in the school hallway. The show’s understanding of what female friendship looks like during adolescence is rare to find on TV. We made sense of it together, imperfectly. Anna and Maya’s best friendship makes me remember what it was like growing up with my friends, all of us enclosed within the same confusing walls of what that all meant. As awkward and painful as they can be to watch, the intimacy of reliving the traumas of middle school is what makes me love PEN15. And while it finds plenty of ways to laugh about them, these are the parts of growing up that I’ve never seen so honestly depicted on any other show. Puberty is more than physical, we all came to learn so quietly it’s an emotional evolution, too.īoth seasons of PEN15 force possibly unwanted memories of weird hair growth and torturous clothes shopping back into our heads. Anna’s feeling of betrayal when she discovers that Maya’s been getting her period for months already and never told her will likely speak strongly to anyone who watched a friend develop before them. (As things often go if you’re unpopular in middle school, that ends pretty badly.) I remember experiencing both of these common scenarios, but even the show’s more specific events are powerfully resonant. Maya delves headfirst into her sexual awakening, continuing to lust after her season-one crush. Anna struggles with her parents’ divorce and seeks out self-empowerment while offering undying support to Maya. In season two, the girls’ relationship is stretched almost to a breaking point. And it makes for beautifully relatable stuff, particularly thanks to the show’s increased focus on how puberty strains Maya and Anna’s friendship. 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. In my laughter, I found not just cringey memories and sympathy but a powerful sense of empathy, too.Īnd where PEN15’s first season concentrated on building out the show’s premise with episodes about AIM and the Spice Girls, 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. But the emotional moments wrapped up in that hilarity - the ones that captured how strange it is to confront your racial, sexual, and personal identities for the first time - won me over even more. I immediately bought into the show’s deadpan hilarity of adult women in butterfly-print cargo pants, wanting to be liked by “hot” preteen boys and win tickets to a B*Witched concert. I tore through season one’s 10 episodes when they came out in early 2019. I fell in love with 13-year-old Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone, coming to forget they were played by women years older than me in real life (30-something PEN15 co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle). It’s a good sell, and it made for an incredibly funny and sometimes heart-wrenching watch. The sell is that the show’s (often raunchy) humor comes from its very specific, very nostalgic Y2K references, and from the dissonance of seeing two grown women perform the hormonal trauma that is seventh grade, right alongside actual preteens.
IS GROWN UPS 2 ON HULU SERIES
The Hulu TV series is a woman-led, semi-autobiographical middle school comedy set right around the start of the new millennium two adult women play their preteen selves, while everyone else in their world is portrayed by more age-appropriate actors. In its first season, the conceit of PEN15 seemed straightforward. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend. One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature.
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