‘Pen15’ Is Back to Plumb the Agony and Ecstasy — But Mostly Agony — of Middle School
Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle dig even deeper into the mortifying depths of middle-school misery in the new trailer for Pen15, which returns to Hulu on Dec. 3.
Pen15 is set in a perpetual purgatory of seventh grade in the year 2000, with Erskine and Konkle playing adolescent versions of themselves while the rest of the cast is filled with actual middle and high school-aged kids. The new run of seven episodes will mark the second part of the show’s second season, the first of which premiered last September (a special animated episode aired over the summer).
In the new trailer, Erskine and Konkle’s characters (named, obviously, Maya and Anna, respectively) grapple with all sorts of adolescent angst. While Anna gets to relish the joys of having a new boyfriend, she also has to contend with her parents’ divorce and an unexpected death. And Maya finally gets her first kiss, but not after suffering the torture of third-wheeling it with Anna, as well as the humiliating double-shot of her mom saying she’s not mature enough for a cellphone because, as she deadpans while holding up a pile of neatly folded underwear, “You don’t even know how to wipe. I got the stains out for you.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone this summer, Konkle said of how she and Erskine approach the show: “There are so many funny and fucked-up and sad memories within the in-between time of childhood and high school. You’re not a child, and you’re not a teen. You’re experiencing sexual things, and your brain is changing, and your body is betraying you. It felt like, ‘I want to talk about the first time I was fingered. It hurt. And it was funny. I was pretending I liked it, and then I walked around with a waddle for a day, because he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. He was, like, mining for gold.’ The more shameful was the funnier stuff to us, and we thought that would not be accepted. But more people seem to appreciate the secret-telling, the stuff that we were told not to talk about.”
