#Pen15 disney plus series#

The new episodes are officially referred to as a continuation of Season Two, even though the show has been mostly gone for more than a year. What had once been a funny but extremely broad show was now something much smarter and richer, if also sadder.Ĭovid forced production on the second season to shut down after only seven episodes had been produced. As a result, those episodes last year got to spend a lot of time digging into the emotional reality of the most awkward years of a girl’s adolescence, from Maya hiding news of her first period from Anna to Anna’s anxiety about her parents’ marriage crumbling before her eyes.

#Pen15 disney plus series#

After a while, it was only during the opening credits, featuring photos of Erskine and Konkle when they were actually in middle school, that the casting of the two stars (who co-created the series with Sam Zvibleman) felt like an illusion at all. When Pen15 returned last fall for the start of its second season, Konkle and Erskine had already disappeared so deeply into their gangly, awkward younger selves that it was easy to forget they were really adults squeezed into ill-fitting, year-2000 fashions, unflattering haircuts, and/or orthodontia. On one level, this is a wink at the central gimmick of the Hulu comedy: that Anna ( Anna Konkle) and her best friend Maya Ishii-Peters ( Maya Erskine) are 13 years old, but played by women in their early thirties, while all the other kids on the show are played by age-appropriate actors.īut by this point in the series’ lifespan, it barely even feels like a joke.

“I don’t usually go for younger girls, but you’re different,” a high-school boy tells Anna Kone in the next new episode of Pen15.