Previewing PEN15

As we sit here in peak TV, it is a bit surprising that the overabundance of outlets producing shows, there are very few super-weird content. Back in the eighties when there was significantly less content there seemed to a lot more weird stuff. Sure it was quite clear that creators and television and movie executives were doing copious amounts of cocaine. Seriously kiddies, not only was there a movie where two office flunkies carried around the dead boss for an entire movie, that actually got a sequel where I believe the corpse started to move by itself because of a voodoo curse. Le sigh. I miss those days.

So I got a little excited when I heard of the completely absurd concept for PEN15 (no, it is not pronounced Pen Thirteen, look at it some more, you will get it eventually): two thirty-somethings playing versions of themselves as thirteen-year-old outcasts in the year 2000, surrounded by actual thirteen-year-olds in seventh grade. The two women are Maya Erskine (who also starred in one of the few other weird shows this decade Man Seeking Woman which featured Lyla Garrity being best friends with a Japanese Penis Monster, seriously) and Anna Konkle (who was also in an episode of Man Seeking Woman but my be best known for Rosewood) who both co-created the show and wrote most of the ten episodes.

Yeah, it gets extremely weird seeing two women almost three times the age of their co-stars act out the most awkward time in everyone’s life. And sure it is extremely funny to start out but then it gets kind of creepy and fast. In episode three Maya becomes a chronic masturbator and it just feels dirty watching a thirteen year old character touching themselves even if she is being played by a thirty-one year old.

Then despite being labeled outcasts, the two girls do seem to have a steady stream of suiters and it is so creepy watching these women flirting with barely teenaged boys, I was expecting Chris Hansen to pop out multiple times. Though I did notice a couple times in the credits that there were stand in’s for some of the scenes, and the scenes were cut in such a way, it was obvious there were a couple stand in without seeing the credits. Oh and I think I saw more menstrual blood on this show than every show I have previously watched combined.

Despite the high concept, at heart PEN15 is a nostalgia show. In the premiere we get early 00’s gems from Mandy Moore, Lit, Lifehouse and the most underrated, and really the second best TLC song Unpretty. And of course there is dial up modems,  Ask Jeeves, Ace Ventura jokes, and the first R-rated movie the girls watch is the best trashy movie of the era Wild Things. Surprisingly we do not get to see the girls react to the Kevin Bacon coming out of the shower scene.

The most nostalgic of all the episodes is when the girls first log on to AIM. Everyone under the age of twenty really needs to watch the bizarre online mating rituals of people who just started using the internet on a primitive messaging app that you could only use for limited times because you needed to dial into your phone, which was connected to the wall and could only be used to call things… Yeah describing how we used the phone and the internet at the turn of the century to people under twenty is hard. You may just have to watch to understand.

All episodes of PEN15 are available tomorrow on Hulu.