PEN15 (Sky Comedy) started out as a show that leaned on the grotesqueness of the teenage experience, and was constructed on the foundations of a largely visual joke – that the 13-year-old versions of the two protagonists, Maya and Anna, were played by actors in their 30s, while the other 13-year-olds around them were played by actors of that age. Yet its early fondness for a gross-out gag has evolved and it has matured into a remarkably sensitive and beautiful series about life, friendship and growing up. This run of final episodes, which conclude a second season delayed by the pandemic, mark the end of the show. It is bowing out at the peak of its powers.
It returns with Bat Mitzvah, in which Becca, one of the Mean Girls-esque characters who is far more popular than Maya or Anna, has her batmitzvah, having been reminded to chase her classmates’ RSVPs during a lesson about the Holocaust. Becca’s disdain for Maya, a running theme of the series, turns a party into a finely tuned study of peer pressure and economic status, as Maya starts to realise that her family cannot buy Swarovski jewellery with the same ease as some of her classmates. When Maya hands Becca the gift she has forced her father to buy, it is a terrible, awkward snapshot of teen power dynamics and porcelain-thin self-esteem.
Often awkward and usually excruciating, PEN15 conjures all the most painful parts of growing up and forces its characters to act them out, slowly, as if tiptoeing over a cliff edge. While Maya is learning about her social class, Anna is having an existential crisis, brought on by the discovery that there is evil in the world. Her parents’ divorce is exacerbating her anxiety, and the pressure of the newfound suspicion that life is pointless leads to alcohol, a kiss and a potential new boyfriend. All the great levelling drama of being a teen is here, from trying to be popular to wondering how God could allow great suffering to happen. It all exists in the same heightened emotional state.
By this stage of PEN15, it is largely easy to forget that Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who created the show as well as starring in it, are not 13, which is a credit to its keen eye for detail. It takes place in an American middle school, but you don’t need to be familiar with American schools to relate. It is set in 2000, but its retro appeal is also confined to the background now, and mostly to quick jokes about Discmans, waiting for a phone call that might never come, or endless conversations on the landline. (You know, the thing you couldn’t use when the dial-up was on.) Instead, it has blossomed into an intelligent and creative comedy. It has style and flair, tipping into the surreal when it feels appropriate, never afraid to be inventive. One episode unfolds from the perspective of Maya’s mother, Yuki (played by Erkine’s real mother). There is a scene involving amphetamines at a funeral, a clever use of glow sticks and light to convey a panic attack, and, in one especially tense moment, a use of perspective that is wordlessly devastating.
If some of its early, cruder humour has been lost, that seems like a fair exchange. What remains is still funny and sometimes hilarious, though it is all tempered with fragility, and the sense that the characters are not quite grown-up enough to deal with what the world is throwing at them, until they do deal with it, usually together. This is sweet without being sickly, and that is a rare and hard-won balancing act. Its tone is perfectly judged.
The show is so pitifully accurate about how cringeworthy teenage life can be that, at times, it is tough to watch. I put my hands over my eyes more frequently while viewing this than I would during a horror film. Towards its end, with the arrival of a sinister stoner named Derek, the series takes on a darker hue. Death intrudes on Anna’s life, and sex begins to nudge its way into Anna and Maya’s immediate world. I found the very last episode surprisingly upsetting, and wondered if this was really how it would end. And then it pulled out its PEN15 superpower, turned its lights up, and became something touching and brilliant again.