like, ‘Let’s just give the traditional eigh-
teen-dollar check.’ And I was, like, ‘You
will fucking ruin my life if we give that.’”
Mutsy told me that when Erskine was
about thirteen she started feuding reg-
ularly with her brother and her mother.
“Taichi said it was unbearable to be
here,” Mutsy said. “Peter was often away,
and we’d be having these arguments.
Even the next-door boys said, ‘Shut up!’”
Mutsy and Peter walked me through
the family room to Erskine’s childhood
bedroom, which is now a guest room
with soothing turquoise walls. In the
hallway outside hung a photograph of
Mutsy and a young Erskine in a hot
spring in the Japanese town of Hakone.
During Erskine’s youth, the family went
back to Japan about once a year, and in
their bathroom in Los Angeles Peter and
Mutsy installed a Japanese-style soak-
ing tub. It is roomy and pale blue, with
a foldable top made of hinoki wood. As
an adolescent who longed to fit in, Er-
skine struggled with her Japanese iden-
tity. “I think I had this belief that not
being white or looking like other peo-
ple around me made me wrong,” she told
me. But bathing with her mother in the
Japanese tradition was a source of com-
fort. “We would have a really heated ar-
gument, like her screaming ‘I hate you!,’
and Maya would say, ‘Mom, let’s just take
a bath,’” Mutsy recalled. Erskine included
that ritual in “PEN15,” and in the upcom-
ing season she wrote and directed an ep-
isode that tells Yuki’s backstory. “Maya
kept calling me Mom on set,” Mutsy
joked. “I did not like that. ‘Mom, put
your hands here. Mom, do this dance.’ I
am a professional!” She added, chuck-
ling, “Even now, she reverts.”
I
n 2014, Erskine, Konkle, and Zvible-
man wrote a sprawling, sixty-page
script for the first episode of “PEN15,”
which Konkle affectionately described
as “the pilot that went in the trash.”
Still, it piqued the interest of an exec-
utive at Party Over Here, a production
company created by the comedy collec-
tive the Lonely Island. At the time, Party
Over Here had a development deal with
Fox to sign new talent and fund short
proof-of-concept shoots. With a bud-
get of a hundred and fifty thousand dol-
lars, Erskine, Konkle, and Zvibleman
shot a fifteen-minute “PEN15” episode,
which featured Maya and Anna primp-
ing before a school dance while listen-
ing to Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl
Wants.” In early 2016, they sent the video
to HBO, Showtime, FX, and Hulu,
along with a pitch packet that looked
like a fake yearbook. On the cover page
of their master copy, Konkle typed a
joke about pubescent nipples and a man-
tra: “The thirteen year old inside me
lives at all times.”
FX told the women’s agent that the
show was “too millennial.” HBO was
interested, but only if the team would
keep making “short form” content. In a
meeting with Showtime, Erskine pre-
sented a male executive with an old snap-
shot of her with her father and joked
that she had masturbated right before
it was taken. “He was, like, ‘I’m starting
to get nauseous,’” she told me, adding,
“It was the worst pitch of all time for
me.” Hulu ultimately committed to a
one-season contract, with a budget that
Zvibleman kiddingly described as
“maybe the lowest you can make a show
for and still have a union crew.”
After two years of development, cast-
ing began in 2018. The team sought out
young co-stars who projected natural-
ism—“non-Disney, non-Nickelodeon,”
as Liedman, the Season 1 showrunner,
put it. Sami Rappoport was fourteen
and had never acted professionally be-
fore. Between takes of scenes in which
Becca had to be mean to Maya and
Anna, Rappoport would apologize to
Erskine and Konkle. (“She told us she
was in an anti-bullying club at school,”
Konkle said.) At first, Konkle, Erskine,
and Zvibleman dreamed of featuring
guest stars like Eric André or Amy Se-
daris playing the parts of other teen-
age characters. In the end, they decided
that the effect would be most powerful
if Anna and Maya were the only kids
in school with wrinkles. “It just further
made us like aliens,” Konkle said.
Erskine and Konkle starred in every
episode, wrote the majority of the scripts,
and were minutely involved in post-
production. Their closeness animated the
series, but it also led to arguments and
hurt feelings. Every decision felt acutely
personal. “I remember editing till three
in the morning, and we had to, like, lose
a second to make air,” Zvibleman said.
“And we would fight to the death over
which frame to take out.” They adopted
language to soften how they communi-
cated—instead of “bugging me,” Erskine
would say “bumping me.” At one point,
she sought advice from Rob McElhen-
ney, who writes and stars in the sitcom
“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” with
his longtime friends Charlie Day and
Glenn Howerton. McElhenney told her
that he and his partners had resolved dis-
putes with a simple, majority-wins voting
system. For the “PEN15” team, the method
didn’t stick, though. “So we came up with
“He’s leaving. It’s every man for himself !”
