PEN15: The Lush Horror of Middle School Life

There is a certain strangeness in declaring PEN15 your favourite show. At a time where television only becomes grander, an era of sophisticated dynastic dramas, dystopian parables, and crime epics, I come back to PEN15 - a show about middle school. There’s something to be said about a small-scale comedy that is so compelling it easily topples any high-budget, grandiose show on a ranking list (mine, that is). PEN15 is a tender show. More than any other, I feel the love from its creators baked into every episode - a love for their cast, for their little 13-year-old selves, for their parents, and for the people behind the scenes who help bring these unbearably awkward, private moments to life.

PEN15 is a cringe comedy series which debuted in 2019. Spanning 2 seasons, the second of which was released in two parts between 2020 and 2021, it tells the story of two best friends, Anna and Maya, as they navigate the trials and tribulations of middle school life. Anna and Maya are played by creators Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, both of whom were 31 at the time the show premiered, who act alongside real middle-school aged actors and in Erskine’s case, her actual mother. While this premise raised many eyebrows before the show had been released [how could two 30 year olds feel comfortable acting as peers to a bunch of kids?], it actually contributes to the show’s overall greatness. Erskine and Konkle are outstanding performers - mastering the thin line between humour, heartfelt-ness, and tween idiosyncrasies. After the first episode, you’ve fully bought into the shtick. The child actors are also outstanding - particularly Taj Cross who plays Maya’s long game crush, Sam Zablowski.

This show resonates with me more than any other piece of media I've ever watched. I am about a decade younger than Erskine and Konkle, but having attended elementary and middle school in the 2000s, I’ve never seen something more accurate to my experience. Yet cultural specificities aside, PEN15 can be universally enjoyed. It captures a flux period of everyone’s life which is incredibly impactful on our adult years, but which is sorely underrepresented in media (the territory of the high school experience has been cultivated to death). The only other media in recent memory which depicts middle school accurately is Eighth Grade - a similarly tender portrayal, but one that lacks the absurdity of this time period.

PEN15 attacks the nuances of middle school - in all its grotesqueness, with elegance. It makes me turn away with embarrassment, cry with recognition of shared trauma, and hug my bestie in fits of sentimentality. This is a constant throughout the show’s two seasons, but every once and a while there is an episode which can be described as nothing less than a masterpiece. For me, Season 1 episode 9, “Anna Ishii-Peters”, is just that. In this one, Maya is ecstatic because Anna is staying with her for a couple days while her parents are out of town in a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage. At first, they get along famously - finally able to get up to all the antics they would be getting up to if they actually did live together. But slowly Maya, whose childhood immaturity still lingers where Anna’s does not, begins to grow jealous of Anna’s special status as a guest in the house. Perceiving her family’s treatment of Anna as preferential, Maya lashes out, making Anna feel alienated during her stay. In her immaturity, Maya does not realize that her family is being kinder to Anna because she’s going through a difficult time at home with two distracted parents. The Ishii-Peters’ are taking this opportunity to give Anna the kind of attention that her parents are unable to give her right now.

As someone who, as a child (younger than Maya is here), took my friends staying over as an opportunity to exert the power over them that I did not have at school (I get the best Barbie because it’s my house), often getting jealous when my mother treated them kindly as any good parent would, and by the end of the stay treating them with callousness - this episode was difficult to watch. In recent years, I’ve considered apologizing to one of these childhood friends - who I’ll call Emma. A couple nights a week, my dad would pick up Emma from school with me. She would eat dinner with us, and if it called for it - sit in on my ballet rehearsals. Emma was a pretty blonde and the subject of affection from all the boys at school. She was also very sweet. With a retrospective look, I think in my jealousy over the attention Emma received at school, I often lashed out at her when she came over. I treated her harshly - and when her mother would come to pick her up, I’d force her to hide in the bathtub - throwing my toys over her and turning off the lights so she could stay a bit longer - although I’m sure she wanted to leave. What I did not know, being a child myself, was that Emma’s dad had recently committed suicide. Her mother, left to pick up her life as a single parent, was having to work night shifts to accommodate for this abrupt and tragic change in her and Emma’s lives. My mother reminded me of this recently, and I feel nothing but shame - and also a great amount of distance from my childhood self. This episode was like looking my ugliness in the face. But while Maya is behaving out of turn, the show does not villainize her. She often acts spoiled and immature, but also faces a great deal of insecurities that Anna does not. PEN15’s power is its ability to cast grayness onto every scenario it presents. It nails the nuances of middle school life with expert precision.

I attended middle school from 2008-2010. Having been placed in a special education plan (insufferably titled: “the gifted program”) which was still a burgeoning project for my school board, I was forced to transfer between two vastly different middle schools. The first was a low-income school in the Mimico neighborhood of Toronto. I was in a class of 15 kids, and only four of us were in the grade 6 cohort. Our presence in the school, which was made up of kids who had pretty difficult home lives, was an unwelcome one. This led to many hostile encounters between ourselves (slightly more privileged kids who were told way too young that we were “special”), and the rest of the student population. This, coupled with the fact that I was fresh out of elementary now associating with the 13-year-olds in my split class, exposed me to experiences that I was not mature enough to deal with.

Funding in that particular district was low, and given the way we clashed with the school, the program there was quickly dissolved. I was then transferred to an affluent school deeper in Toronto’s WASP-y west end. This was a major shock for me - as I was now thrust into a starkly different world. One where we readily put our hands on chests to recite a pledge of allegiance to the Queen every Monday morning, and where a Muslim kid in my grade was suspended for protesting the singing of a Christian hymn during our annual Remembrance Day assembly (this was a non-denominational public school). Not only was the gifted program more robust here, the majority of the student population, by virtue of their parents’ wealth, excelled in almost every extra curricular activity imaginable. We were number one in the city, and sometimes even the province, for track and field, soccer, chamber choir, symphony orchestra - and even skiing. I was, again, a fish out of water.

This period of my life was dictated by constant fear of social humiliation. An exhausting state to maintain for 7 hours a day, 5 day a week, two years straight. The school, with a top-tier heating system, was very hot and my mother, a naturopath with an irrational fear of Advil and basically all “chemical ingredients”, forced me to wear natural deodorant during my peak of puberty. So most of my time was spent keeping my arms locked to my side for fear of someone smelling me. Where all of my classmates had begun gifted in grade 4, I had started in grade 6 in a very ad hoc program at a different school. Needless to say, I did not excel at academics. I also did not excel at music, again with a much less comprehensive cello education than my peers. The school, and by extension its culture, valued athletic ability above all else - skills of which my gangly, clumsy body could never master. Half of my time was spent trying to evaporate.

I spent the rest of my waking hours pining for the cutest boy in our grade - someone who indulged me because it flattered him, but never returned my affections. I wrote him paragraphs on Facebook detailing the minutia of my evenings. I messaged him “accidental” hellos. I frequently would hit him with “I’m bored xP’s”, until one day a girl told me he found it annoying. I would stand in the cloud of Axe perfume he left in front of his locker every morning, and cry quietly when I wasn’t assigned a seat next to him on the bus to Ski Day. This all culminated when my best friend, who had undergone a rapid transformation at the end of eighth grade from art nerd to sport hottie, decided she liked him too. When I left our orchestra camp a day early to go on vacation with my family, I knew it was the end. I returned home to a long-expected call: “Maia. Something happened. I’m so sorry.” “I already know what you’re going to say.” “We kissed at the camp dance. He really liked me, and he’s asked me to be his girlfriend.” The blow of which still creeps up now and again, despite the triviality of the situation.

None of this is to say I did not have a charmed life growing up - I did. But my growing brain absorbed these memories and turned them into potent, lasting emotions that I cannot let go of. Crashing in front of everyone during your ski test. Your crush asking you to slow dance, “Purple Rain” blasting overhead. Finding out a boy in your class told all the other boys in the locker room that your legs were hairy. Slapping him in front of your teacher. Playing with your toys, as the heat of shame rises up your face. Being ignored by your friend on a trip to her cottage - getting your period in front of her dad. Wearing swim trunks to a pool party. Losing your first kiss to a dare. I can remember this period more clearly than I remember the last five years of my life. It’s so important we see it reflected back to us.

PEN15 is wonderful. If it’s Season 3, episode 13’s “Luminaria” - where the girls grappled with existential thoughts as they come to terms with the fleeting reality of a kid who has cancer, or Season 2’s “Sleepover”  - where the show explores the politics and (many many) microaggressions of female tweenage friendships, or the finale episode, “Home”, where Maya feels pressured to have an intimate sexual experience before she’s had her first kiss, PEN15 captures a lushness of tween life unlike any other show of its kind. Middle school was traumatizing. We need to laugh about it.