But, where “Big Mouth” is characterized by raucous, Technicolor flights of fancy (including memorably foulmouthed “hormone monsters”), “ PEN15” favors a punishing, slightly off-kilter realism.
TWISTED INSANE TOUR SERIES
The Netflix animated series “Big Mouth” rivals “ PEN15” in its gloriously candid approach to the arrival of puberty. Several showrunners of the streaming era, freed from the constraints of network television, have mined the raunchier side of tweendom.
TWISTED INSANE TOUR TV
They are not the first TV creators to put their characters through the trials of early adolescence, but their show has little in common with upbeat nostalgia vehicles like “The Wonder Years” (1988-93) or even “Freaks and Geeks” (1999-2000), Judd Apatow’s beloved series about a pack of winsome nerds. Erskine and Konkle made the show with the writer and director Sam Zvibleman, who inspired the depiction of Maya and Anna’s sweetly dopey male classmate Sam (Taj Cross).
“ PEN15” premièred in 2019 and became a cult hit. Konkle, staying in character, said, “What? I’m glad you’re enjoying life.” O.K., I need that.” (To each other, Maya and Anna are Mai and Na.) Erskine turned to look at Konkle, but then she broke again. She took a breath and regained her composure.
Then she got the giggles and had to stop. Dippin’ Dots! Dippin’ Dots!” Erskine exclaimed suddenly, eying a station offering ice-cream pellets. “No, I mean, like, on Earth,” Konkle said. “I dunno, it’s Becca’s bat mitzvah,” Erskine replied.
“Who are these people, and why are they here?” Konkle muttered. “Oh, my God, this party is amazing,” Erskine said. Konkle, as Anna (tall, laconic, slouched), stood behind her, glowering, in the throes of a fatalistic mood brought on, earlier in the episode, by a lesson on the Holocaust. The women took their places, in a buffet line, and the episode’s director, Dan Longino, called “Action.” Erskine, as Maya (short, hyperactive, impish), jiggled her body to the beat. Teen-age extras and white-haired elders in yarmulkes checked out a station for making airbrushed T-shirts. playing the 1998 techno-pop song “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” as a triad of sequin-clad hype dancers did the Running Man on a laminate dance floor. A camera crew was filming B-roll footage of a d.j. At about 11 A.M., they entered a banquet hall inside the Pacific Palms, where the party had been staged in period-specific teenybopper style. The women were preparing to shoot an episode from the show’s third season in which their younger avatars attend a popular girl’s bat-mitzvah party at a country club. Their junior-high burlesque is a sight gag as well as the heart of the series more literally than most teen pariahs, Maya and Anna have trouble fitting in. Erskine and Konkle don’t convincingly pass among them, but that is the point. It’s painful, but so is being thirteen.Īll other middle schoolers on “ PEN15” are played by adolescents: the popular girls, the other outcasts, the unrequited crushes. (“My orthodontist made a mistake,” she said.) The mouthpiece cuts into Konkle’s gums and makes it nearly impossible for her to eat or drink. The women then moved to an adjacent costume trailer to complete their “ PEN15” looks: for Maya, a black bowl-cut wig that resembles a giant porcini mushroom, similar to Erskine’s haircut in fifth grade for Anna, a set of protruding pop-in braces that mimic the ones Konkle had to wear-twice. Beside her, a hair stylist twisted strands of Konkle’s fine blond hair around the neck of a tiny curling iron, creating bouncy corkscrews. “I was made fun of for being hairy-I had a deep insecurity about that,” Erskine told me. In the makeup trailer, Erskine sat in front of a vanity mirror as a stylist wearing a face shield used a felt-tip pen to paint hundreds of tiny strokes onto her upper lip, creating the illusion of a faint mustache. The women, who are both thirty-four, are co-creators and co-stars of “ PEN15,” a Hulu series in which they play versions of themselves as teen-agers, the thirteen-year-old best friends and misfits Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone. It was a sizzling August morning in 2021, but inside a hair-and-makeup trailer parked at the Pacific Palms Resort, an hour east of Hollywood, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle were returning to the year 2000. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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