The show also nails the big, formative moments - say, stumbling into masturbation as if it were a secret activity you had invented - and the impossibly small minutiae I was convinced only I had experienced (e.g., deeply regretting inviting your best friend to sleep over after watching them, with silently building fury, get along better with your own family than you).īut the second season, which debuted on Hulu last week, features one of the most accurate and sensitive portrayals of a young boy grappling with his burgeoning sexuality that I’ve ever seen on television, let alone in a comedy. The contrast of Erskine and Konkle’s size in relation to the real kids on the show perfectly captures the awkwardness of puberty when bodies seem to look and feel weird.
Erskine and Anna Konkle (Anna) - the show’s creators, along with Sam Zvibleman - play 13-year-old versions of themselves surrounded by actual child actors wearing puka shell necklaces and plastic butterfly clips (that I shudder to inform you are now considered period costumes). When PEN15 premiered in 2019, it won deserved praise for the unbelievably accurate verisimilitude of the middle school experience for kids in the early 2000s. What did she want from me? What exactly did she think I was going to do in return? While the rest of the night is a fog, during that interview I could suddenly recall the fear I had felt as she approached in vivid detail. I made a hurried excuse about needing to use the bathroom and left.
It wasn’t an absurd question - we were there to dance, after all, and a couple of my friends had already peeled off with some of hers - but her touch sent me into a panic. But then suddenly it came rushing back: The sheer horror I felt as a young girl approached me amid the multicolored lights of the teen disco our mothers had driven us to, touched me on the arm, and asked me to dance. I guess I quite literally blocked the experience out of my mind. I haven’t thought about that year 8 dance in what feels like centuries. He recounted going to a school dance and then running away - literally running away - when a girl tried to grind on him. Your hair is.hot,” he manages to reply, hesitating on that final word as if it were from a foreign language.Ī day after I first watched it, I was interviewing another queer man around my age about the scene and he recalled similarly freaking out at the advances of a girl when he was young. That word “hot” seems to prompt a Pavlovian response from Gabe, and he jerks his hand away from hers, leaving her silently heartbroken. “Your hair looks different,” she says, shuffling nervously. Maya (Maya Erskine), one of the awkward 13-year-old best friends the show follows, is holding hands with boyfriend Gabe (Dylan Gage) at an afterparty for their school play when she compliments his hair. Then, much later, it left me completely reeling. There’s a moment in the final episode of the second season of Hulu’s masterful cringe comedy PEN15 that successfully made me, well, cringe.
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