Stream It Or Skip It: ‘PEN15’ On Hulu, Where Two Grown Women Play 13-Year-Olds Surviving Seventh Grade

Seventh grade is rough, no matter when you went there. Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle remember their awkward 7th grade days so well, that they teamed up with Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island to create a show where they plays their 7th grade selves, even though they’re now both firmly into adulthood. Can you watch PEN15 without cringing that they’re playing against real 13-year-olds?

PEN15: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two 13-year-olds on the phone with each other, looking at their 2000 sixth-grade yearbook, and talking about the cute boys, the mean girls, and the one who grew boobs over the summer.

The Gist: The girls are Anna Kone (Anna Konkle) and Maya Ishii-Peters (Maya Erskine), best friends since they were in kindergarten. They’re about to start seventh grade, their first day in middle school, and they want to make sure they do it together. They plan on what they are wearing; Maya even cuts her hair so it looks the same as the hair of Buffy-era Sarah Michelle Gellar. Of course, she screws it up, leading her mother Yuki (Mutsuko Erskine) to get the bowl out to fix it. Anna reassures her that she looks “hot.”

When they get to school, the girls immediately begin to lust after boys that still look like kids (because that’s what most 7th-grade boys look like… they develop slower than girls). Anna ends up kicking a kickball into that kid’s face. Maya sees notes taped to their lockers that two boys are competing for her, but it turns out that they just think of her as the UGIS — Ugliest Girl In School.

Maya is devastated, so she goes to an expert in revenge: Her eighth-grade brother Shuji (Dallas Liu). She bungles the “bitch out” after school and the two of them become even bigger outcasts.

Our Take: So, one of the things you have to get out of your head right away when watching PEN15 (which looks like the word… oh, you know what word it looks like) is that its two leads are adults playing 13-year olds, and that every other young actor around them are actual teens and preteens. That notion is a little weird — Erskine is 31 and Konkle is 24 — but it makes sense when you realize that the show’s co-creators (along with Sam Zvibleman) are playing versions of themselves when they were in 7th grade (which, for Erskine, was in 2000).

The fact that they’re adults is part of the joke, especially because they are able to channel their former vocal fry-spewing, awkward selves from a decade or two ago so easily — Maya even wears a Care Bears hoodie!. But when you realize that Maya and Anna are being played by adults, the “ick” factor is high at first. But the show is so funny, and Erskine and Konkle are so good at playing 7th grade outcasts and best buds, that the “ick” dissipates within the first half of the first episode.

There are a few early ’00s references on the show — they enter school with Lit’s ubiquitous 1999 hit “My Own Worst Enemy” playing, and a couple of the kids wear Slipnot and Korn t-shirts. The girls talk to each other on landlines. But otherwise, it’s not really a period piece; heck, I was in 7th grade all the way back in the early ’80s, and I was able to recognize and laugh at the agony that these girls are going through as the class outcasts. At least the two of them have each other, and it feels like the more they stick together as they grow into themselves, the funnier the show will get.

Sex and Skin: When the girls look at the classmate who grew boobs over the summer, there’s a shot of gigantic, bra-free, undulating breasts under the girl’s sweater. That’s what Maya and Anna saw. A wide shot shows more realistic development.

Parting Shot: After taking back her name from the boys’ room UGIS list, Maya tells Anna that she can’t face 7th grade. Anna reassures her that she’ll be with her. So they once again face the class by taking the first step together.

Sleeper Star: Taj Cross plays Sam, who carpools with Anna, Maya and Shuji — he makes fun of Maya, but we figure out how he really feels when he tears down the signs that were mocking her.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Maya tries to bitch out the boys who called her UGIS, she mentions one of the kids’ recently-dead fathers, which of course brings the whole thing to a screeching halt. That seemed to be too easy of a way to make the whole thing extraordinarily awkward.

Our Call: STREAM IT. You’ll get past the adults-acting-as-kids thing fast, because PEN15 brings the laughs quickly.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream PEN15 on Hulu