THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 23
the show with the writer and director
Sam Zvibleman, who inspired the de-
piction of Maya and Anna’s sweetly dopey
male classmate Sam (Taj Cross). They
are not the first TV creators to put their
characters through the trials of early ad-
olescence, but their show has little in
common with upbeat nostalgia vehicles
like “The Wonder Years” (1988-93) or
even “Freaks and Geeks” (1999-2000),
Judd Apatow’s beloved series about a
pack of winsome nerds. Several show-
runners of the streaming era, freed from
the constraints of network television,
have mined the raunchier side of tween-
dom. The Netflix animated series “Big
Mouth” rivals “PEN15” in its gloriously
candid approach to the arrival of puberty.
But, where “Big Mouth” is characterized
by raucous, Technicolor flights of fancy
(including memorably foulmouthed “hor-
mone monsters”), “PEN15” favors a pun-
ishing, slightly off-kilter realism. Erskine
and Konkle told me that they were in-
fluenced by such films as Todd Solondz’s
1995 black comedy, “Welcome to the
Dollhouse,” about a seventh-grade girl
who endures, among many other cruel-
ties, the sobriquet Wiener Dog. The
name “PEN15” comes from a schoolkid
prank that begins with a question: Do
you want to join the PEN15 Club? The
suckers who say yes get the word Sharp-
ied on their hands in such a way that it
looks like “PENIS.” “It felt appropriate to
name our show after the thing that re-
jects get branded,” Erskine said.
If you, like me, are a millennial and a
recovering social reject, watching Erskine
and Konkle relive seventh grade can feel
alternately wistful and triggering. The
series’ title sequence is a rapid-fire slide
show, set to Bikini Kill, of real snapshots
from Erskine’s and Konkle’s youths. Each
half-hour episode follows Maya and
Anna through pool parties, athletics,
school plays. The show pays loving and
amusing attention to Y2K-era teen ob-
sessions: choker necklaces, Sarah Mi-
chelle Gellar, “Wild Things,” AOL In-
stant Messenger. It also unsparingly
depicts the psychosocial dynamics of ad-
olescence, when cliques and cattiness can
whittle away at kids’—and especially
girls’—self-esteem. Watching the pilot
episode, in which Maya learns that her
name is scrawled on the wall of the boys’
bathroom beneath the acronym UGIS—
Ugliest Girl in School—I felt my own
junior-high mortifications come rush-
ing back: the time a boy pretended to
ask me to a school dance as a cruel joke,
or when a blond mean girl urged class-
mates to hide the ketchup from me at
lunch, or when a friend announced that
I should really learn how to shave the
backs of my knees. Yet “PEN15” doesn’t
appeal only to one demographic. When
the show premièred, a few critics sniffed
that it seemed thin or gimmicky; Tim
Goodman, of the Hollywood Reporter,
lamented “the repetitive sketch feel of
the whole thing.” But the majority were
won over. Season 1 got an Emmy nom-
ination, and Season 2 got three more, in-
cluding for Outstanding Comedy Se-
ries. James Poniewozik, the Times Gen X
television critic, told me, “‘PEN15’ sounds
like itself and nothing else—the mark
of great TV.”
When I suggested to Erskine and
Konkle that they were making a “cringe
comedy,” Erskine said, “We don’t really
write jokes,” adding, “Someone once
called it a ‘traumedy,’ and that’s proba-
bly the closest way to describe it.” In-
stead, the creators and a small team of
writers pore over their yearbooks and
their juvenile correspondence. They trade
real-life tales of scarring first kisses and
frantic masturbation attempts. The more
painful the old bruises, the more inclined
they are to apply pressure. Gabe Lied-
man, a co-showrunner for Season 1, told
me about one of the early scenes they
shot, in which Maya, Anna, and three
of their classmates film a Spice Girls-in-
spired video for a homework assignment.
The group decides that Maya, who is
half Japanese, should play Scary Spice
(the only group member of color), and
that she should also be the other girls’
“servant”—“because you’re, like, tan,”
one girl explains. Maya plays along,
adopting an exaggerated accent and
hunching over like Quasimodo to ex-
tract a laugh from her more popular
peers. During the shoot, Erskine did a
few takes of the scene and then broke
down crying. “It scared the shit out of
me,” Liedman said. “There were these
literal twelve-year-old girls in Spice Girls
costumes who have never heard of the
Spice Girls, and it’s a heat wave, and
Maya is heaving sobbing. I was, like, is
it my responsibility, as a manager here,
to shut down this set?”
But Erskine forged ahead. She ex-plained, “Anna started crying, and then
members of the crew started crying. It
opened up this flood of everyone sharing
stories. That was a light-bulb moment.
We realized, Oh, this is what this show
is.” Their young co-stars grew emotional,
too. Sami Rappoport, who plays Becca
(the scene’s Baby Spice), told me, “Film-
ing that was really hard. They didn’t ex-
pect for it to hit as deep as it did.”I
n “PEN15,” pubescence is a purgatory.
“The conceit of the show was that
they think they’re in seventh grade for-
ever,” Erskine told me. “It is this ex-
treme microscope. It’s, you know, inter-
minable Hell.” The one solace Maya
and Anna have is that they are not stuck
there alone. At the end of the first sea-
son, a boy treats both girls to a brief,
above-the-clothes trip to second base
inside a storage closet during a school
dance. (As with other scenes that re-
quire intimacy between the women and
their teen castmates, this was accom-
plished using an adult stand-in and care-
ful camera angles.) At the beginning of
the next season, Maya and Anna learn
that the whole school is gossiping about
their “threesome.” “So we’re desperate
sluts, great,” Maya says.
In real life, Erskine and Konkle didn’t
know each other in middle school. Er-
skine grew up in Los Angeles and Kon-
kle in Massachusetts. They first met in
the summer of 2008, when they were
N.Y.U. undergraduates studying abroad,
in Amsterdam, as part of an experimen-
tal-theatre workshop. The curriculum
was intensive and eccentric—postmod-
ern dance, commedia dell’arte, mask
work. Erskine said that one of her early
encounters with Konkle took place in a
bathroom before a “Brechtian fairy-tale
storytelling” showcase. “We were both
freaking out,” Erskine said. “I had diar-
rhea. We bonded over our I.B.S. issues.”
In Amsterdam, and then back at
N.Y.U., the pair became inseparable.
They discovered pleasing parallels in
their biographies—both had fathers
named Peter and older half brothers;
both were the only children of their
mothers’ second marriages—and a shared
attraction to telling, as Konkle put it,
“the most vulnerable stories, that most
people would not tell at a party.” They
thought about collaborating on a proj-
ect, but after college Konkle stayed in