Drama
Doctor Who
The good Doctor’s been flitting around time, space and the BBC since 1963. Now he’s also a fixture in the US, toting his curiously British brand of sci-fi in his highly mobile TARDIS. Just how safe is this contraption?
I know that Dante, Milton and plenty of others have offered their thoughts on what the, ahem, bad place might look like. Fire. Ice. Crime-appropriate punishments. But for lots of us, the closest approximation we might have in our own memory banks is seventh and eighth grade.
Only a select few students loved middle school, and they were surely free of both acne and self-reflection. (I’m assuming they all own yachts today.) The rest of us loathed it, stepping into middle school’s halls every day like convicted killers marching down the Green Mile. Our bodies were changing in unpleasant ways. Our hormones were turning us all into strange creatures straight from Dr. Moreau’s isle. We were moody and mean and horrifically insecure—certain that we were ugly and dumb, and equally sure we’d be that way forever.
Things do get better, of course, but few of us would ever want to go back to the fraught, insecure days of junior high.
Comedians Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle are two of the few.
It’s the early 2000s. Angelina Jolie is married to Billy Bob Thornton, CBS’s Survivor has only just started and Blockbuster Video has just turned down an offer to buy Netflix, cheap. Meanwhile, teenagers Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone are in middle school.
Oh, sure, they may look like they’re older—in their 30s, in fact. But don’t let that fool you. They’re the most harshly-pecked kids in Trailview Middle School’s exceedingly harsh pecking order, surrounded by (real) kids who have little to say and less to do with them.
It’s not that they don’t try to make inroads here and there, and some classmates do deign to pass a word or two with them in the hallways. Certainly, they each have their own romantic interests.
But they’ve got some allies in their quest for acceptance, too, albeit reluctant ones. Maya’s über-cool older brother, Shuji, occasionally offers pointers on how to navigate middle school—as long as Maya and Anna keep it secret. And Sam, a kid they ride to school with, may seem as jerky as they come, but he has a soft heart underneath.
Most importantly, they have each other. And that’s not to be underestimated.
“You are my actual rainbow gel pen in a sea of blue and black writing utensils,” Anna tells Maya, and it’s true (if not literally true). As ludicrous and unseemly and profane and grotesque and tawdry as Hulu’s Pen15 can be, Maya and Anna’s friendship feels real and true and oh-so affirming. It reflects the fact that most of us made it through middle school (or junior high) with the help of our faithful friends—the few folks who made life’s slings and arrows if not enjoyable, at least tolerable.
Pen15 feels honest—raw and painful in spots, but funny, filled as it is with the sort of humor that only age and perspective can give. Much of what we see here would fall into Plugged In’s “problematic content” categories, to be sure, but as a graduate of public school myself, I remember a lot of this problematic content vividly. It filled my junior high’s hallways every day.
Which brings us to the core point: While this show is obviously written about middle school, it’s intended for adults—and boy howdy, how adult it can get.
We hear lots of talk about middle school sexual activity (be it real or rumored or imagined or some confluence of all three). We also see some played out on screen (which is accomplished using age-appropriate body doubles for the two leading actresses). Language—beginning with this show’s infantile and textually suggestive title—can be incredibly raw and often uttered by the pre- or barely-pubescent actors onscreen. And because we’re talking about being in the teeth of adolescence here, the behaviors we see can be crude and mean and unconscionable.
Yes, for most of us, middle school was a pretty terrible time. Most of us would never want to go back. And while Hulu gives us a clever, surprisingly poignant peek into the constant stresses and occasional joys of those days, Pen15 reminds me that I’m all grown up now. I know better. And I don’t have to go back anymore. Not even on TV.
Maya and Anna work through problems in their friendship, their love lives and their school play.
Anna bonds with another teen over their parents’ divorces. And after being mean to her mom, she also notices her dad being mean and decides to apologize. She cries after learning that she’ll have to choose which parent she wants to live with.
A boy doesn’t want to kiss a girl onstage, so he blocks her lips with his hand. Later on, he kisses her on her jaw before admitting that he doesn’t like her (it is implied that he might be gay). A girl pretends she is making out with someone. A woman’s top shows cleavage. We glimpse a girl’s underwear under her dress.
Middle schoolers perform a play about extramarital affairs. They pretend to drink onstage. After the show, two teens drink from a flask and talk about getting drunk. There are frequent uses of the s-word, “b–tard” and “b–ch.” There are also several misuses of God’s and Christ’s names. A girl threatens to put an ice pick up her dad’s “butthole.”
Maya and Anna are thrilled about going into seventh grade. But after Maya tries to give herself a Sarah Michelle Gellar haircut, and her mother attempts to fix it up with the help of a mixing bowl, their optimism fades. Indeed, before the day ends, Maya’s branded as the year’s UGIS, or “the ugliest girl in school,” and she sneaks into the boy’s bathroom to cross her name off the official list.
Maya and Anna are obsessed with breasts in a seventh-grade-girl sort of way, discussing crudely the necessity of bras and marveling at a classmate whose own breasts grew to astronomical size during her “last night at camp.” (When they see her at school, they, and the camera, ogle the girl’s chest.) Another female classmate allegedly had a sexual encounter (which is graphically narrated) with a couple of her male classmates. We hear repeated references to the male anatomy. Maya retaliates against a bully with a crude verbal reference to said anatomy, saying its unusual appearance is why his father died. (Onlookers try to comfort the crying boy.)
Playing kickball, Anna whacks a ball into someone’s face. “Take your victim to the nurse!” the no-nonsense gym teacher tells Anna. Anna tries to make small talk with the boy (whom she has a crush on), telling him, “You don’t even look bad with blood on your face.” (Elsewhere, Anna also tries to be alluring to the boy by showing off her bra straps.) Maya begs her cool older brother to beat up a couple of bullies. Middle school girls act really mean.
Maya and Anna begin and end almost every sentence they say with an “OMG,” yielding nearly 30 misuses of God’s name. The f-word is dropped six times, and the s-word is used 10. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch” “d–n” and “d–k.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
The good Doctor’s been flitting around time, space and the BBC since 1963. Now he’s also a fixture in the US, toting his curiously British brand of sci-fi in his highly mobile TARDIS. Just how safe is this contraption?
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