PEN15 Season Two Is Here—And If You’re Not Watching, You Are Robbing Yourself of Joy

Watching season two of PEN15, the shocking Hulu comedy series that stars two adult women as middle schoolers alongside actual preteen and teen actors, has brought on for me what I can only describe as a sympathy puberty. I laugh, I weep, I yell at my mom, I wish I had bigger boobs, I get overwhelmed and go have a snack.

After a lifetime of watching men capture and codify their every thought and fart, it’s wildly fulfilling to see the women of PEN15 take the least contained, least appealing part of their lives—middle school—and make it into art. Decades past puberty, I watch scenes in which the girls are excluded and misunderstood and feel that infinity-pool overflow of unwilling, hot tears. I see them argue over AIM and laugh so hard that I trigger my anxiety and have to close the computer and do a breathing exercise. My feelings leak out of me, vividly recalling the years before I used tampons, when I would sit in class or the cafeteria and feel my period blood leave my body, soaking what was, for all the slick advertising, a glorified diaper.

Adolescence, which PEN15 tackles with the force of a yellow straw plunging into a CapriSun, feels like a loss of control. The body starts to give off pungent animal scents and to be three kinds of damp at all times; cuteness drains away, and with it the protection it provided. PEN15 captures this sublime hysteria by focusing on the perspective of its female-identifying victims. Sadly, this is groundbreaking. Happily, the show, which stars real-life best friends Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, who cocreated it with Sam Zvibleman, is like Curb Your Enthusiasm for women who grew up in the ’90s. It feels like the comedy I have been waiting for my whole life.

The first season of PEN15  got raves from critics for pulling off a tricky premise and for building a portal to the 2000s out of gel pens and Spice Girls references. But the impact of the show is much bigger than that: It uses the experience of tweenage girls in the 2000s to observe how much being alive is about making desperate attempts to be accepted, masking humiliation, and oozing bodily fluids. Konkle, Erskine, and Zvibleman universalize a female experience so successfully that I feel compelled to go door to door to every man who ever told me I just had to watch Seinfeld or acknowledge that Joe Rogan is “objectively” funny. “You have to watch these girls share custody of a single hot pink thong,” I'd say to them. “You have to watch them play with ponies and pretend to be witches and bully each other at sleepovers. It’s objectively funny.” 

Konkle and Erskine met as adults, in one of those moments of physical control that extend, tragically, past puberty. They were in college, taking an experimental theater class, and they ran into each other in the bathroom, where they were both having anxiety diarrhea. Their relationship continued to be defined by the workings of the human body: They bonded over sharing stories of youthful masturbation and learned that each had cried after experiencing her first kiss. “I had never in my life laughed out loud like that,” Erskine told Glamour, of seeing Konkle perform for the first time.

The discomfort of being in a body dominates PEN15. “But we can’t, can we? Yes, we can.” That’s how Konkle describes the conversations between her and Erskine as they go from sharing “secrets that we were ashamed of” to scripting scenes containing masturbation, periods, and free-floating human hair. “Okay, let’s show the blood that we have to see all the time,” they agree tentatively, and soon their 13-year-old selves’ greatest fear is set to be reenacted, filmed, and released on a streaming service.

These are the fears of 30-something-year-olds too. Both Konkle and Erskine say that they are embarrassed most of the time when they first start thinking about putting taboos on TV, but they do it with each other's encouragement. “For years you’re taught that your period, your vagina, masturbation, your sexuality, your body are shameful and disgusting and not cool,” Erskine says. “Having a female best friend and support essentially saying, ‘No, I think this is good’…that’s how, I think, we push through the fear and shame.”

In the second season of the show, the girls attend a pool party where their seduction plans are thwarted by a mom with a “no wet suits in the house” policy. They make a third best friend, and attend a sleepover in a scene that I’m pretty sure was just paid for and planted by my therapist to get me to confront middle school trauma. They join the wrestling team, telling themselves that girls are bitches and boys are no-nonsense straight shooters who would never, for example, gather in a locker room and talk about girls as body parts instead of people. 

Even a home-school veteran would relate to this. The scenes in PEN15 are not just a send-up of suburban aughts seventh grade but a send-up of all social interaction. Middle school and high school never really end; the participants just get taller and are responsible for paying more bills. The racism Maya faces from popular girls isn’t different from the racism adults experience on social media, on job interviews, everywhere. The trauma Anna experiences as her parents separate will stay with her even after cargo pants and polo shirts go out of fashion. The middle school habit of putting other people down as a way to pull yourself up never goes away.

Even the name of the show is both a time capsule of early millennial culture and a symbol of the way our bodies can reward or betray. “PEN15” refers to a prank: You ask someone, “Do you want to join the pen fifteen club?” They say yes, and then you write “PEN15” on their arm, which actually looks like the word penis. Get it? They wanted so badly to be a part of an exclusive club that they allowed themselves to be branded; now they’re a walking joke. It’s a pretty specific reference but a timeless phenomenon: Wanting to be included continues to be one of life’s sickest pranks.

Konkle says she’s surprised people find PEN15 so funny. In the years they spent conceiving and pitching the show, they agreed to be “brutally honest”—but neither Konkle nor Erskine thought of themselves as comedians before making it. They’re more interested in what’s true. “We find that humor comes from pain, always,” Erskine says. “It always comes from painful truths.” 

So much of enjoying mainstream comedy is listening to jokes about dicks—how big they are, how hard they are, what woman might be tricked into interacting with one. This show has plenty of dick jokes. But this time the girls are holding the pen.

PEN15 season is streaming on Hulu now. 

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

Originally Appeared on Glamour