Pen15 Hulu Original Season 2 Part 1 Review
Major Spoilers are included in this season review. Please read with caution.
On September 26, 2020, I started watching Pen15 Season 2 Part 1—a cringe-comedy show—with my siblings over the weekend and finished on October 2, 2020 without them. Season 2 Part 2—another 7 episodes—is slated to come out on Hulu sometime next year, but the episodes we got went deeper into the cringey, awkwardness, and horror of realistic middle-school drama. I enjoyed the first season a lot, and decided to keep watching the second season.
Pen15 went deeper. I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist saying the awkward, cringey pun. Now, let’s dive into this review.
Released on September 18, 2020, Pen15 continues what it did during Season 1—making us laugh, cringe, and avoid direct eye contact to avoid triggering those humiliating middle-school memories—in addition to adding surreal moments of hormones taking over the human body for attention. The most prominent example of this “attention-seeking validation” is Maya and Anna’s new friend Maura (Ashlee Grubbs), who changed the dynamic between them by awkwardly adding herself into the group.
Pen15 did a solid job on showing realistic middle-school behavior, and how every little thing gets magnified through the young girls’ perspective. How Maura would keep picking favorites and leaving the other out through the smallest of acts. My frail heart…
The attention-seeking validation screamed—cringed—through every little action taken or not taken by Maya and Anna—like in the form of awkward glances and stunned expressions—which are so naturally believable. It’s hard to remember they are not actual middle schoolers, and that they fit in the scenes so well with actual middle schoolers. I am honestly impressed with their performances throughout this series.
Maya and Anna’s family situations are explored further in this season too. Anna lives with divorced parents, who share half the house. Maya’s father goes out on music tours all the time, so he’s never home, but Anna definitely has it harder with the parents who will never stopping arguing with each other—yelling constantly throughout the house. I was having bad flashbacks at one point—the realness overwhelmed the cringe.
The funny moments are still there though, so rest assured. Anna becoming a stage manager of a middle school play had made me LOL for real. The humor dynamic between Anna and Maya is more balanced too. Anna tends to go for more dry humor—in how she conveys her tone and opinions—while Maya tends to go for blunt humor; I don’t know the technical name for this, but she goes all-out whenever she delivers her type of humor.
Overall, Pen15 does a great job on being relatable. Everything I talked about in this review can go back to relatability and how we can all relate to the growing pains of adolescence. This is hard to remember sometimes, but everybody in our lives—everybody we will ever meet—has gone through or will go through adolescence.
Thanks for reading this season review, everyone. I would recommend giving this Hulu Original a chance.