General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

PEN15

PEN15 is an American cringe comedy television series that premiered on Hulu on February 8, 2019, in which adult creators and stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play fictionalized versions of themselves as thirteen-year-old outcasts in the year 2000, surrounded by a cast of actual young adolescents.¹^•² Hulu describes it as an R-rated "traumedy" set in middle school "as it really happened," in a world where "seventh grade never ends and the pains of growing up are inevitable."¹ The series ran for two seasons and concluded on December 3, 2021.²

Key fact	Detail
Premise	Erskine and Konkle play their own 13-year-old selves, Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone, in the year 2000, acting alongside real teenage performers¹
Run	Premiered February 8, 2019; final episodes released December 3, 2021; two seasons of 10 and 15 episodes, about 30 minutes each²^•³
Creators	Created, written and executive produced by Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, and Sam Zvibleman¹
Executive producers	Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, and Ali Bell of The Lonely Island/Party Over Here, plus Marc Provissiero, Brooke Pobjoy, and Debbie Liebling¹
Emmy nominations	Outstanding Comedy Series (2021); Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series (2019 and 2021); Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series (2021)⁴
Critical scores	Rotten Tomatoes 97% overall (season 1: 94%, season 2: 100%); Metacritic Metascore 87, with season 1 at 82 and season 2 at 93⁵^•⁶
Rating	TV-MA in the United States³

Spoilers

Premise and title

The show follows two best friends, Maya and Anna, through seventh grade in the year 2000: hopeless crushes, unfortunate haircuts, pubescent changes, and constant humiliation, alongside their struggle for acceptance from peers and adults.⁷ The central conceit is that the two leads, then in their thirties, play the young versions of themselves while every other middle schooler is played by an adolescent of that age. The New Yorker's Rachel Syme observed that Erskine and Konkle do not convincingly pass among the child actors, and that this is the point: their "junior-high burlesque is a sight gag as well as the heart of the series," making the characters' failure to fit in literal.⁸

The title comes from a schoolyard prank that begins with the question, "Do you want to join the PEN15 Club?" Those who say yes get the word Sharpied on their hand so that it reads "PENIS." Erskine explained, "It felt appropriate to name our show after the thing that rejects get branded."⁸

Cast and characters

Erskine plays Maya Ishii-Peters and Konkle plays Anna Kone.³ The supporting cast includes Mutsuko Erskine, Maya Erskine's real-life mother, as Maya's Japan-born mother Yuki Ishii-Peters; Taylor Nichols and Melora Walters as Anna's parents Curtis and Kathy Kone; Taj Cross as Sam Zablowski, a sweetly dopey classmate inspired by Zvibleman; and Dallas Liu as Maya's brother Shuji.³^•⁸

The physical transformation of the leads was elaborate. Erskine wore a black bowl-cut wig resembling a "giant porcini mushroom," similar to her own fifth-grade haircut, and a stylist painted hundreds of tiny felt-tip strokes onto her upper lip to create a faint mustache; Konkle wore protruding pop-in braces mimicking the ones she had worn twice, a mouthpiece that cut into her gums and made eating or drinking nearly impossible.⁸

Creation and development

In 2014, Erskine, Konkle, and Zvibleman wrote a sprawling sixty-page script for the first episode, which Konkle described as "the pilot that went in the trash." It nonetheless interested an executive at Party Over Here, a production company founded by the comedy collective The Lonely Island, which then had a development deal with Fox to fund short proof-of-concept shoots. With a budget of $150,000, the three shot a fifteen-minute PEN15 episode featuring Maya and Anna primping before a school dance while listening to Christina Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants." In early 2016 they sent the video, along with a pitch packet styled as a fake yearbook, to HBO, Showtime, FX, and Hulu. FX passed, telling the women's agent that the show was "too millennial."⁸

Erskine and Konkle starred in every episode, wrote the majority of the scripts, and were closely involved in post-production.⁸ Erskine has described the show as about 75 percent autobiographical: "The masturbation plotline is true, the divorce is true, but that isn't how things happened exactly."⁷

Themes

The series is set against a detailed turn-of-the-millennium backdrop of dial-up internet, AOL screen names, the Spice Girls, and B*Witched.⁷ Critics grouped it with other frank middle-school stories of its era, such as Netflix's animated Big Mouth and Bo Burnham's film Eighth Grade, but noted its distinct register: where Big Mouth favors raucous flights of fancy, PEN15 favors what The New Yorker called "a punishing, slightly off-kilter realism," and Erskine and Konkle cited Todd Solondz's 1995 black comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse as an influence.⁸

The Washington Post's Inkoo Kang argued that the show's cultural specificity made it "thoroughly singular in its depiction of Asian American girlhood." Maya's household portrays Japanese culture in a balanced, matter-of-fact way, including shared baths drawn from the Erskine family's life, and storylines address the casual racism of Maya's classmates, who mock her for being half-Japanese.⁹^•¹⁰ Common Sense Media highlighted the show's unflinching portrayal of female adolescence, including Maya's shame about masturbation and Anna's distress at her bickering parents' impending divorce.¹⁰

Reception and conclusion

Season 1 earned a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and season 2 reached 100%, with the site's critical consensus calling it "an excellent showcase for Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, and their well-cast classmates."¹¹ On Metacritic, season 1 scored 82 and season 2 scored 93, the latter including a 100 from The Guardian, whose reviewer Rebecca Nicholson wrote that the show had matured from its gross-out beginnings into "a remarkably sensitive and beautiful series about life, friendship and growing up."

The series received four Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 2021, when it was nominated alongside black-ish, Cobra Kai, Emily in Paris, The Flight Attendant, Hacks, The Kominsky Method, and Ted Lasso.⁴ It was also a 2021 Peabody Awards nominee, and IMDb records 2 wins and 27 nominations overall.¹²^•¹³

In November 2021, Hulu confirmed that PEN15 would end after the second season, with Erskine and Konkle deciding that the story they wanted to tell had come to an end; Hulu stated it would "continue to leave the door open for more Pen15 in the future."¹⁴ The final seven episodes, delayed by the pandemic, were released on December 3, 2021.⁹^•² The series remains available on Hulu in the United States and can be purchased digitally on platforms including Apple TV Store and Amazon Video.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Sitcom and comedy series › American sitcoms and comedy series › 2010s cable and streaming comedies

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?