Between the TV series based on Elena Ferrante’s literary tragedy My Brilliant Friend and the rude and playful work of Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson in Broad City, between the web series Brown Girls and Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of Little Women, it seems, at last, that young women and their friendships are coming into focus. Not until movies like Booksmart-with its extended conversations about masturbating with an electric toothbrush-and television shows like PEN15- with its comically huge representation of a tampon-has the collective weirdness of being an adolescent girl been shared with such visual comfort and comedy on the screen.īooksmart and PEN15 are pinnacles of what critic Alyssa Rosenberg described, in 2015, as a “ golden age of female friendship.” Female friends-besties, frenemies, rivals, and almost-lovers-have come to dominate the screen. 1 Until recently, few television shows or movies have considered female sexuality in the same collective, comical, and visually explicit way.
In each of these buddy movies, the singular experience of one boy is linked to a common experience of boyhood. While there is a long tradition of buddy comedies-from the tenderhearted Stand by Me to the equally tenderhearted but far more crude Superbad-most entries have focused on the experience of boys. In the show, what at first seems to be a visual gag turns out to be a powerful argument for the sustainability of female friendships-specifically, friendships grounded in forms of creativity and play that have historically been devalued in middle school and Hollywood alike. And so the show invites the question: If not marriage or long-term romantic partnership, what options exist for female BFFs-who hope to both maintain the friendship and carve out their own worlds for themselves-to be as close as possible and to be individuals? PEN15’s premise-two adult collaborators playing teenage best friends-allows the viewer to simultaneously perceive two different time frames of a female friendship. It also points to the ways in which our friendships formed, and continue to form, who we are today. It points to the ways in which 30 is not that far from 13: the ways you can slip back into that hunched, emotional, bleeding weirdo you hoped you had left behind years ago. While the premise is a fantastic joke that highlights the discomfort and embarrassment of puberty-Maya and Anna the characters are made even gawkier by the actors’ height and the wigs and fake braces that were added to make them into their teenage selves-it also serves a formal and emotional purpose. It is rude and brutal and tender, taking on masturbation and microaggressions and gel pens with equal seriousness. Watching adults smile through their braces and talk on corded phones in their childhood beds feels like both a great joke and a great tragedy, because we know, from our own experience, that seventh grade is probably not going to be amazing.Īt first glance, PEN15 seems to be purely a sketch show, thrilling in the deep humiliation and gross-out humor of the two adult women discussing every detail of their awkward middle school years. (The rest of the cast is made up of real middle schoolers). I got the stains out for you.There was only one TV show this year that made me cry, and it wasn’t This Is Us it was a TV show about two girls, one with a bowl cut and one with braces, who deeply, desperately believe that seventh grade will be “amazing.” PEN15 takes place in 2000, and the two stars and writers-Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle-are 31-year-old women playing their 13-year-old selves.
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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. 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.
In the new trailer, Erskine and Konkle’s characters (named, obviously, Maya and Anna, respectively) grapple with all sorts of adolescent angst. 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). 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. 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.
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