Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, the co-creators and stars of Hulu's "PEN15," may have met junior year at NYU's Tisch School of Arts, but reliving the middle-school era of their lives in the adult comedy has deepened the creases of their friendship like a carefully folded up — and doodled on — letter passed between BFFs during social studies class.
"I feel like we still have a conversation, at least once a month, where I am like: 'Tell me again what you were doing when this happened' or 'What did you think of this band?'" Erskine says.
"Yes," says Konkle, "I love hearing stories any time we get on Facebook together and she shows me of photos of like, 'Well, this is the guy who .
"We lived such different lives but we also have so many similarities," Erskine adds, addressing Konkle through a video conference screen. "It's so weird. But there's no way to describe how doing something like this changes a friendship, because to relive moments — some that are really fun, some that are not, some that are so innocent and so fun to be naive and laugh while next to you — I don't even know how to really wrap my head around the fact that I get to relive these moments together.
The first season of "PEN15" introduced viewers to delightfully socially awkward seventh grade besties Anna Kone and Maya Ishii-Peters — played by the two creators and real-life BFFs, performing alongside actual teens — as they navigate the cringeworthy and angsty battlefield of adolescence in the year 2000.
Though at its core the series is a comedy, it's been praised for the way it uniquely captures the social and emotional tragedy of the middle-school years with heartrending and hormone-fueled honesty.
Premiering Friday, the first half of the second season picks up not long after the school dance, with Maya and Anna talking by phone and delighting in the aftermath of their shared moment of intimacy while playing a game of M.A.S.H. — the fortune-telling game popular among kids of a certain age. Over the seven episodes, Maya attempts to get closer to Brandt by taking an interest in wrestling, while Anna struggles with the tension caused by the separation of her parents (Melora Walters and Taylor Nichols), who still live together.
"We weren't like, 'OK, this is going to be a darker season,' but we knew that the characters had to grow, even though they stay constantly in seventh grade," Erskine says. "Part of that is there are deep falls. We took falls Season 1, but it was more naively or innocently, and we had each other — and the greatest fall is not having each other .
The friends are talking over Zoom on a particularly sweltering weekday — and it's not lost on anyone that there'd be fewer tech issues had the conversation happened over AIM. Erskine, nearly swallowed up by a towering house plant behind her, is beaming in from the Los Angeles home she shares with her fiancé; Konkle, also in Los Angeles, is at her manager's office taking refuge in an air-conditioned space since electricity has been out at her own home.
There are no bowl cuts or braces in sight, but it almost feels like the year 2000 because Erskine quickly points out that her computer is on the fritz: It fell off her couch while she was distracted by a game of M.A.S.H., which she was playing during an interview earlier in the week. It gets the pair talking about the wonder of that silly game, and the significance of its reference early on in the season.
"You want to infuse meaning into whatever is outside your control," Erskine says. "Like, I saw a 'B"— I think Brandt loves me! I used to have a friend who would put songs on shuffle and she would ask a question, like a Magic 8-Ball, and then whatever the song was, the lyrics would be her answer.
"Those answers," Konkle continues. "It's the age that you start fantasizing. You manufacture the ideal life."
It gets the pair reflecting on this phase of their lives and the way small moments can get blown up, overanalyzed, and more brightly shaded than a Lisa Frank pocket folder — which fuels much of Maya's story arc in Season 2. Erskine tells a story about a middle-school birthday party she attended at a church recreation room that left a lasting impression on her.
"This guy asked me to dance and I, like, danced standing on his feet," she says. "He kept twirling me around and for some reason he was like two feet taller already — cause that's how middle school is, all of a sudden someone has jetted up. In my head, I was like, 'I am with a man and he's spinning me around.' Nothing else happened, but I talked about it for years. Even now when I think about it, I'm like, 'Whoa!' It just elicits a feeling — kind of the first feelings of like a real romance. So we wanted to have that obsession happen."
The show also explores what it's like coping with the sex-shaming rumor mill — primarily targeting girls — that often comes with adolescence.
"I was in seventh grade and an eighth grader came up to me and was like: 'I heard you masturbated with an ice cube,'" Konkle says. "And then the town, truly the town, came up with a genius diabolical nickname, Icebox, and that followed me. I was not at all sexual, which was kind of the worst part, because I was either slut-shamed by the girls or I was kind of fetishized by the guys. I definitely wanted to be liked by the guys, but to be liked for something that I wasn't ready for was too much for me.
"To be shamed for your sexuality when you're not even experiencing it on your own — like, you don't even get to have that," Erskine says sympathetically. "It's forever clouding your judgement around that."
"And I don't know if this was related or not, but I didn't masturbate 'til I was like in my 20s," Konkle says. "Because I was so shamed. I knew where the rumor started from, but I was going to take it to my grave, which was from playing Truth or Dare in, like, fourth grade.
With the second season, Erskine and Konkle were interested in seeing how their characters would evolve from these seismic life moments.
"When we started, we knew that the girls were staying in seventh grade, always," Erskine says, "so how do they evolve? What does that mean? How do they grow up? And so the idea of being exposed to more things and interpreting it differently but still not having the coping skills to deal with it, that was interesting to us.
But viewers won't see the full scope of how those questions are explored at once. The season had to be split in two because, in a refrain all too familiar in Hollywood this year, production on "PEN15" was suspended in March in the wake of increasing concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus.
They were two weeks from shooting the final episode of the season, which would have been directed by Erskine, and had some scenes from other episodes that still needed finishing. "I was like, 'We've got to get people out of here,'" Konkle recalls. "I was acting like I'm part of the U.S. government." It was an added stress on production. In the middle of shooting the season, Konkle found herself dealing with the death of her father — an already emotional experience made more so considering the journey her character is on in relation to her own parents.
"It was two months of flying from Florida and really just changing the whole production around," Konkle says.
It's unclear when exactly the second half of the season will be ready for launch. But the duo promise the growing pains — in all their excruciating glory — will continue with the last half of the season..
"It's dealing with even more adult s—, really," Konkle says. "We are more in the mentality of, like, we're older now, we're teenagers now. That comes with a lot of fun and a lot of maturity that we don't know how to deal with."