“Seventh grade is going to be amazing.”
It takes roughly five seconds—the very first line of the series—for you to reflexively cringe and your heart to shatter into a million pieces during the premiere of PEN15.
It’s the year 2000. Best friends Anna and Maya are on the phone the night before the first day of school, gossiping about what boys they have crushes on, which cool girls to cozy up to, and all the positive ways they’ve physically transformed over the summer in order to blow everyone away in their new grade. “I’m also thinking of wearing a bra,” Anna confides. “That’s like really smart,” Maya supportively nods. “You need it for nipples.”
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You don’t need more than those few seconds with Anna and Maya, spitting their naïve optimism through respective constellations of orthodontia, to know that seventh grade will not, in fact, be amazing for them. You knew Anna and Maya, and the fate about to befall them. If we’re all being honest, you probably were Anna and Maya, still working through the trauma triggered by time spent in the toxic incubator of insecurities and cruelty that is a middle school hallway.
PEN15 is Maya and Anna’s story. It is all of our story.
The comedy series, which launched on Hulu Friday, is co-created by real-life best friends Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, along with writer-director Sam Zvibleman, and loosely based on the 31-year-old pair’s respective middle school experiences. The name comes from a cruel playground prank. “It’s an ode to the rejects, the people who had that written on them,” Konkle tells me. “Because we did,” Erskine says.
When people talk about excellent pop culture crafted around the melancholy and the adventure of adolescence, it’s rare for the genius to be rooted in a gimmick. But that’s precisely what sets PEN15 apart.
Konkle and Erskine star as the show’s fictional Anna and Maya, two grown adults in their early thirties acting against a cast of actual middle school-aged young actors. Konkle wears braces and contorts her tall frame into a gawky cadence, while Erskine tapes down her chest and sports a wig styled into a tragic bowl cut, the result of her character attempting to give herself layers using only a picture of Sarah Michelle Gellar on the cover of Teen magazine as a guide.
The sight gag underlines a universal truth: none of us truly fit in in middle school. But Konkle and Erskine’s commitment to their characters is so transformative that the gimmick quickly gives way to the authenticity of the seventh grade experience. That whole disaster.
In the first episode of PEN15, Maya is floored when she learns that the two hottest boys in school have crushes on her. But it’s all a bullying ruse meant to build Maya up so when the cruel punchline lands—the boys actually are going to proclaim her this year’s U.G.I.S., the Ugliest Girl in School—it is all the more devastating.
For all the pain, PEN15 captures the adrenaline-filled thrill of a time in a person’s life when everything is new, exciting, and unknown: Body parts and body hair; kisses, hormones, and sexual exploration; friends and mistakes made under peer pressure; bras and thongs; and, especially in this Y2K setting, the world at your fingertips through an AIM chat or a query to AskJeeves.
In its glowing review of the series, The New York Times calls PEN15 “the square-peg kid sister of Broad City and Eighth Grade.” It’s both a hilarious comedy and a horror show, bridging the genres with a simultaneously uncomfortable and cathartic reflection of the human spirit at its most brittle stage of development.
Figuring out in the writer’s room which anecdotes to include—trying a beer for the first time, figuring out masturbation, being jealous of your friend making another friend—was surprisingly organic. The experiences PEN15 depict all have purpose, Konkle says. “Maybe it was something that made us feel less alone, or was a secret that was hopefully going to be someone else’s, too.”
Someone would share a story, and a chorus would chime in that they know that feeling. Like what, I ask? “Um, well, getting nipples before breasts,” Konkle says, bashfully.
On the show, fictional Maya and Anna cry a lot.
“I like describing the show as an opera, because middle school is a real extreme time of highs and lows,” Erskine says. “It’s life or death. It’s a bunch of firsts. It’s operatic.” Erskine’s mother plays her character’s mother on the show, and her brother worked as an editor on it. He jokingly reported experiencing PTSD from their actual childhood watching Maya reenact those heightened emotions on the show.
“It’s a bizarre time,” says Konkle. “If somebody wasn’t crying a lot, I would like to meet them.
Of course, mortification never leaves our lives, though it may be felt more deeply in adolescence, with only 13 years of life experience to give it context. Those horrors may shape us and prove formative, but they never stop happening. To wit, Konkle and Erskine met under circumstances of diarrhea while studying in Amsterdam as NYU Tisch School of the Arts students engaged in a study abroad program.
As they recently told New York magazine, they had anxiety over a performance in the style of Bertolt Brecht they were assigned, and encountered each other “dealing” with those anxieties in the bathroom. They bonded instantly, respectively pursuing their own acting careers when the NYU program finished before reuniting to write their own projects. They first started working on a script for PEN15 six years ago.
“Our first script that we wanted to sell as a pilot was maybe 45 pages, which had like #MeToo characters in it and everything,” Erskine says. “We read it with our friends and Anna remembers asking them OK, does anyone have any notes and they all raised their hands immediately. That was humbling.”
The script was eventually picked up with the men of Lonely Island—Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone—on board as executive producers. “I was like, yeah but we should probably keep our schedule clear for next year,” Konkle remembers. “So naive. It took a lot longer.”
It is of note that, unlike their characters, the duo are not childhood friends. That their characters’ connection on PEN15 pulses with such a rooted lifelong connection speaks to the fact that deep friendships are meaningful at any stage of life, and that the touchstones of those relationships are instantly to familiar to all of us.
When Anna cheers Maya up in the show’s premiere by telling her, “You are my actual rainbow gel pen in a sea of blue and black writing utensils,” I felt that. Konkle and Erskine felt that. We all felt that.
“Your friendship is the most important thing in the world when you’re at that age, and it was nice to remember that and experience that with Anna again,” Erskine says.
That PEN15 is coming from a female perspective matters. The adolescent experience, with rare exception, is exclusively told in pop culture from a male point of view, giving young boys permission, comfort, and even messages of normalcy through their awkward years, with the XY lens still meant to be universally relatable. PEN15 purports that same relatability, but it feels transgressive for the specifics of the experiences to be happening to two girls.
“We were excited to write the masturbation episode,” Erskine proudly proclaims, before immediately lowering her voice to a hush. She and Konkle are in a car full of people, she explains. “Actually, I’m just going to go there,” she says, shouting to the driver: “Sorry, sir!”
“It’s telling the shame that I felt when I did it as a kid and how alone I felt, now that we’re talking about it and showing a female perspective on sexuality and masturbation, I’m hoping it can spark a conversation or make other women go, OK, I wasn’t a freak,” she says. “I wasn’t a pervert. I wasn’t disgusting when I did that, because that was the story I told myself constantly. Because I didn’t see any representation of it as a kid. I didn’t see any representation of it as an adult in a way that felt honest.”
Konkle remembers it being cool for boys to joke about masturbation when she was growing up. “Then as a girl, you didn’t talk about that. Or the joke would be made about you.” They’re both extremely proud of the kind of deliriously weird and beautiful way they handled a masturbation storyline in PEN15. But it’s more than sexuality that needed their perspective. Body changes did too, for starts.
“We always wanted to put puffy nipples on our flat chest,” Konkle says. “That was such a weird seminal moment in our lives, where you have puffs with tits. There was a lot of stuff. Even our period. Things that felt wrong to talk about. A lot of this stuff felt wrong to talk about. It still does, to be honest. So it’s like, alright let’s push the envelope and just do it.”
Given all this talk about the trauma of middle school, I ask Konkle and Erskine what it was like to see themselves transformed back into versions of their 13-year-old selves. Both say the wilder experience was seeing their friend physically regressed into the character, to the point that they became oddly attached to the costumed versions of each other. When Erskine took off her bowl-cut wig, for example, Konkle would tell her how much she would “miss my buddy.”
“I miss her now,” Konkle says, laughing. “I miss that freaky little girl.”
