Experience the Transcendent Awkwardness of Pen15, the Best Show With the Worst Name Since Schitt's Creek

Schitt’s Creek eventually got the fairy tale ending it deserved and every modest Canadian television production dreams of. It blew up in popularity internationally before a righteous sweep of the Emmys in its final season served as a coronation that it merited its place of distinction in the pantheon of all-time great television comedies. 

But it took Schitt’s Creek a couple of years to overcome its name. Despite my love for stars Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara and Chris Elliott, it took me several seasons to finally bring myself to watch a television show named Schitt’s Creek. Once I started watching I was appropriately blown away but it took some time and some space to get there. I know I’m not alone. 

I suspect a similar dynamic is at play with another of my very favorite shows Pen15. The series derives its title from that particular series of letters and words looking like the word “Penis” If that weren’t enough to alienate potential audiences, the show’s central conceit finds creators/stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, both of whom are in their thirties, playing fictionalized versions of themselves as tweens desperately trying to navigate the unrelenting horror of middle school life. 

On paper, the idea of writer/creators in their thirties playing 13 year old versions of themselves seems alternately annoyingly gimmicky and like a Brechtian distancing device designed to highlight the inherently artificial nature of the show itself and by extension all of entertainment. 

Brecht’s concept of “epic theater” held that audiences should approach plays as a representation of reality rather than reality itself. The subversive, miraculous genius of Pen15 is that it doesn’t feel like a representation of reality: it just plain feels like reality. Watching it, I felt like I was back in middle school all over again. Pen15 affords audiences an opportunity to relive the worst, most excruciating moments of their adolescence. It’s not terribly difficult to see why that might not be a terribly seductive or even appealing proposition for a lot of people. Every day I thank God that I am not a thirteen year old boy anymore. Pen15 reminds me why that is. Middle school isn’t something you experience: it’s a crucible you survive if you’re lucky but not without all manner of scars and trauma. 

If Pen15 were not so masterful and pitch-perfect, intense cognitive dissonance would ensue over the stars of a television show being twenty years older than the characters they’re playing and consequently a solid two decades older than the almost disconcertingly natural and convincing child actors in the cast.

Instead Pen15 is so effortlessly authentic that while watching it I lose myself in the show to the extent that I continually forget that Erskine and Konkle are adults playing children rather than brilliant child actors. I don’t feel like I’m watching a television show based on their childhoods so much as I feel like I am watching raw footage from their actual pasts that has been finessed ever so slightly for our entertainment. 

Despite what middle school counselors might sternly insist, very little of what we do between the ages of 12 and 14 matters. There is no “permanent record” containing all of our youthful misdeeds that will follow us through life and keep us from getting into college, having fulfilling careers or experiencing happiness and fulfillment as adults.

But that’s not at all what being a tween feels like. Pen15 beautifully, painfully captures the bruising intensity of life during those agonizing in-between years, when everything, but everything feels like a matter of life and death importance: every crush, every friendship, every assignment, every teacher, every school play. 

More than anything, Pen15 is about the unfathomable complexity of female friendships, about the rich inner lives of friends who are forced by life and circumstance to leave the security and safety of childhood for the scary, unknowable world of adolescence.

It’s exceedingly rare for entertainment to get the tricky emotional waters of childhood and adolescence exactly right. It’s as if there is an unbridgeable gulf between childhood and adulthood that keeps adults from being able to write about childhood authentically.

Consequently, when a piece of art does capture what it feels like to be young and confused and angry and sad and horny and generally just a goddamn mess it feels like a goddamned miracle. That’s why we hold Catcher in the Rye in such reverence that a disturbingly large number of lost souls are literally willing to kill for its truths. Freaks and Geeks is similarly revered for recreating high school life in all of its joy and agony. Pen15 deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Freaks and Geeks. It is its own unique, magnificent, boldly original beast but it also reminded me of Freaks and Geeks in its emotional authenticity and Twin Peaks in its casual surrealism. 

Pen15 isn’t just a good show: it’s a great show. It’s high art. It’s audacious. It’s spectacular. And yet it’s gotten only a fraction of the attention and acclaim that it deserves. 

I am generally not someone who gives a fuck about awards. That is, of course, until I care way too much about awards. I was legit outraged that The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience was not nominated for even a single Emmy, let alone a Peabody or Nobel Prize. Incidentally, the Lonely Island are Executive Producers of Pen15 and if Hot Rod, MacGruber, Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience and all of their albums have taught us anything, it’s that everything that these magical gentleman touch is pure gold. That extends to Pen15. 

And I was so happy for the cast and crew of Schitt’s Creek that I felt like I was winning Emmys along with them. I very much want Pen15 to win a fuck-ton of awards because it deserves them, particularly for writing and acting. But I also want it to win awards so that it will finally get its props for being so much better than its title would suggest and, in its own ferociously imperfect way, just about perfect. 

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