Early February might be a little early to start identifying key television trends of the year. That said, one of the big television trends of the year is definitely adults playing child versions of themselves in comedies.
Friday sees the debut of Hulu’s PEN15, a sitcom where creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play two girls suffering through the multiple indignities of middle school in the year 2000. If that seems familiar it might be because you watched Funny or Die’s Life Sucks, a sitcom where members of sketch group Dinner for One play a group of teens suffering through the multiple indignities of middle school in the year 2001. And if that seems familiar it might be because you watched Netflix’s Big Mouth, a sitcom where Nick Kroll plays a teen suffering through the multiple indignities of middle school in the current day.
For many – by which I mean probably just me – this outbreak of recent nostalgia is superficially quite galling. After all, it means that people almost a decade younger than me are now old enough to write and make entire television programmes about their childhoods, and they can use the sound of dial-up internet as a shortcut to signify the ancient past. In short, curse these children and their wretched youth.
Luckily, though, they’re all good. Big Mouth, you already know about; it’s a filthy cartoon where the forces of puberty are given corporeal form, it has a cast that any other show would chop its hand off for and it’s one of the best adult animations on Netflix.
Life Sucks is also pretty good, although in truth the story of how the show came to be made is even better. As detailed in a Reddit ask me anything (AMA), it involved years of writing, developing, pitching and festival submissions, then a sudden drop in interest when Hulu announced a show with an identical premise. So now all six episodes of Life Sucks are on YouTube instead. It’s smart, dumb, painful and broad in equal measure, and well worth watching.
The Hulu show that killed it, by the way, is PEN15, and it’s fantastic. Erskine and Konkle, both women on their 20s, play 13-year-old versions of themselves in a cast made up of actual 13-year-olds. It’s a weird initial hurdle to get over – not least because, as a show about 13-year-old girls, it involves the leads dealing with powerful feelings of lust for 13-year-old boys – but once you’re through, it is wonderful.
What PEN15 gets right is how absolutely intense everything feels as a teenager. The friendships are tighter, the fall-outs more dramatic, a wrong glance can bring your entire life grinding to a horrible standstill. It feels so authentic that it actually borders on suffocating at times. Luckily, it’s also very funny; Erskine in particular seems destined for big things.
There are many reasons why these shows might have sprung up so close together. Both Life Sucks and PEN15 feel heavily indebted to Freaks and Geeks, and it feels like this is the first possible chance their creators had to pay tribute to it. But there’s also something universal about school outcasts. Everyone was an outcast at school. The only people who never felt alienated at school are either bullies, sociopaths or Conservative MPs, and none of those make for particularly attractive viewer demographics. A show like PEN15 is the closest safe distance you should probably get to your childhood, and it’s all the better for it.
