PEN15: Hulu’s Middle School Cringe Comedy Can’t Keep It Up

Hulu’s new middling middle school cringefest, PEN15, has the specificity that comes with hindsight and the embarrassment that comes with disinhibition. The show, created by Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle and Sam Zvibleman and executive-produced by The Lonely Island, has already been hailed by older critics as intelligent, bold — maybe even sincere.

But this is a middle school series. The staleness pervading PEN15 isn’t because every situation and joke has been tapped before, better, elsewhere — this material has been strip-mined. Decades of John Hughes movies and Nickelodeon TV series exposed every stereotype and laugh and excavated them for all they’re worth. It was a miracle when Bo Burnham put a fresh spin on the genre in last year’s Eighth Grade, and Erskine and Konkle are no Burnham.

Cast Your Age

The supporting cast looks appropriately middle school–aged (except those brawny, cool eighth graders, who appear to have been cast right out of college). But Erskine and Konkle play themselves. The only wrinkle is that they’re 31 and 24, respectively, and they aren’t terribly convincing as youngsters. Maya and Anna freak out in PEN15 about smoking their first cigarette — they find it on the floor of the girls’ bathroom — but the women who play them are old enough to have children of their own – it’s 30 going on 13.

If the casting is intended to satirize the trend of 20-somethings playing high schoolers, Wet Hot American Summer did that already with more charismatic actors (Erskine and Konkle leech energy off of every scene they inhabit) — and that was 17 years ago. Television has more or less rectified that problem, so need we parody the material of the late ’90s? Surely there are more recent trends worth scrutinizing.

Those “recent trends” involve Stranger Things, 13 Reasons Why, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The End of the F***ing World and Everything Sucks, five Netflix series that, though varying in quality, have nailed their casting more often than not. In The End of the F***ing World, you’re completely sold on James’ character because Alex Lawther looks his age. (Jessica Barden, playing his teenage belle, is in her mid-20s, and does not.)

Casting is often a balancing act, trying to match character accuracy with performing ability. Do you cast younger, age-appropriate actors like Kiernan Shipka (Sabrina) and risk that they won’t turn in the performance a 25-year-old might? (Shipka, for her part, is excellent.) Netflix’s creative teams can properly cast not one but four shows with outstanding young performers, so why do we need Erskine and Konkle telling their stories as themselves?

In fact, in a world that feels as though it changes every morning, surely the middle schoolers of today are completely different from when I was in eighth grade. And in turn, they’re leagues away from Erskine and Konkle’s middle school experiences, so why do we need their stories at all? Surely what was fashionable, horrifying, awkward, crazy and risqué when they were in middle school is not now.

While I hold to that everyone’s story is worth telling, Erskine’s and Konkle’s — themselves 7 years apart, so how different were their middle school experiences from each other’s? — are approached from the wrong angle. The isolation of being a minority in an otherwise white school, the death throes of embarrassment, the Faustian quest to be popular — PEN15 traverses well-worn territory, but its thematic ground is still relevant to kids. It’s everything else about the show that’s unbearable, and those shortcomings bungle the thematic deliveries.

The Requisite Racially Charged Episode

The show’s unoriginal but watchable, and ostensibly, the formula beneath PEN15 works. Those lead performances, however, push PEN15 into insufferable, irritating territory. Maya can be stubborn and abrasive, Anna naïve and eager to please. Every interaction between them spirals into a loud, passive-aggressive muck of childishness. The aggravating, provocative behavior might ring true, but a chasmal gap exists between truth and entertainment, and an even bigger one between provocative and effective.

The season’s best episode (and also the most problematic) sees the Japanese-American Maya bullied by other kids at school for her race. “Me love you long time,” someone shouts at her. The episode begins with Anna witnessing their (middle school–aged) friends bullying Maya. On the heels of this, Anna asks Jeeves “am I racist?” and the rest of the episode unfolds about as sensitively as one might expect. She becomes woke overnight and accuses the principal of ignoring racism in his school.

Bizarrely, the series feels as though a legion of the whitest writers in Hollywood tried to pen a show about an Asian-American lead. There’s the requisite racially charged episode, but besides that, the goings-on are consistently soaked in privilege, dripping with uncomfortable, awkward humor and reeking of laziness. Anna pledges to go on a hunger strike until the racism in her school ends — “That might take a while,” the janitor (Diane Delano) tells Anna, offering her a sandwich. Anna sheepishly eats it, breaking the strike.

This isn’t Iron-Jawed Angels — Anna’s a slacktivist with a passion for her friend’s livelihood that’s too infantile to come from a place of love. Are we meant to laugh at Anna for her naïveté? Or are we supposed to cheer for her, knowing that the actress/writer/producer playing Anna is over 30 years old and should know better?

One episode later, the world is right again, and Anna never again brings up the plight of minorities in their privileged white suburbia. An Asian-American voice in this rotten genre would be a breath of fresh air, but this is the sole episode (out of 10 30-minute episodes) that deals head-on with Maya’s race. After that, the matter vanishes, dissipates into the wind.

Conclusion: Hollywood Therapy

Had the writers supplied the episodes with jokes, some of this poor storytelling might be forgiven. But in this post-Bridesmaids world, awkward humor reigns supreme. Why write jokes when your audience can laugh at how uncomfortable your characters are? Squirming in your seat is the new belly laugh.

Erskine and Konkle created a show in which they play 13-year-old versions of themselves and suffer the indignities of middle-school life: Getting your first period, masturbating for the first time, freaking out over boys. It feels like witnessing an odd, self-indulgent form of Hollywood therapy to see Erskine curl up in her mother’s lap (her mother, Mutsuko Erskine, also plays herself, and she’s probably the best actor in the show) and ask, “When you said I’m not your little girl anymore, did you mean that?”

“Gosh,” I thought, watching middle school–aged kids shout racial slurs at a 24-year-old woman, “I wish I had enough money or influence to work out my problems via a teen comedy series streaming on Hulu.” The supposed relatability of the show, its situations and its characters has been lost on me, if it was ever relatable in the first place. 

PEN15 misfires on nearly every level. Even the cinematography from Andy Rydzewski (who also shot the wonderful The Earliest Show) has too many shadows, looking less like Mean Girls and more like Hereditary. Scenes of Anna checking AIM seem ripped right out of Cam, and Maya’s masturbating in her room, alone, feels like a demonic ritual. It wouldn’t be so hard to recut the show into a horror series, or maybe a suspenseful family drama.

Perhaps that’s part of the point, but PEN15 is too flaccid to have any sort of point at all.

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