![]() Anna and Maya are so physically and psychically close to each other in the episode that, for long stretches of time, they’re either wearing identical outfits or stretching out a single T-shirt they’ve squeezed into together. To get to that massive blowup, they knew they needed to start with heightened, almost smothering intimacy. “How that can be the best thing in the world for the first 24 hours, how it can quickly devolve into jealousy, invasion of privacy, losing boundaries, and how that can erupt into a big fight.” “There was something on both sides of that experience, for the girl whose house it is and the girl visiting the house,” Erskine said. Konkle, whose parents divorced when she was the same age as her PEN15 character, remembered staying at her best friend’s house all the time. “I fantasized about turning into that second daughter in their family,” Konkle said.Īs for Erskine, “I felt very jealous of the connection my best childhood friend had with my mom.” The premise of the episode came from pairing a memory of Konkle’s with one of Erskine’s. Tension builds and builds and builds, and then “it turns into this horror thriller.” Below, Erskine and Konkle break down how they plotted out the episode’s emotional beats, scene by scene. “I would say from the beginning, when we were writing it, we knew it would be slightly dramatic and there would be a horror element,” Erskine told Vulture. It’s not quite a bottle episode, but it has that same intensity and claustrophobia, as what starts as a best friends’ shared fantasy - back-to-back sleepovers on a school night while Anna’s parents are away - devolves into disaster. Both girls, unbeknownst to each other, are going through something seismic and life-altering: Anna’s parents have left for a “couples’ retreat” that will end in their decision to get a divorce, and Maya is getting her period for the first time. The honored episode is “ Anna Ishii-Peters,” the second-to-last installment of the season. ![]() Konkle and Erskine, along with writer Stacy Osei-Kuffour, are nominated for an Emmy for outstanding writing for a comedy series, PEN15’s first nod in a stacked category that also includes Barry, Fleabag, The Good Place, Russian Doll, and Veep. I know as many millennial friends who’ve devoured it, delighting in its period accuracy - the high-rise thongs whale-tailing out of low-rise jeans! The eerr-EERRAH-erNERRGH sounds of dial-up internet! - as those who were too physically pained by memories of full-body awkwardness to make it through the first episode. Hulu’s PEN15, which chronicles the 2000s-era best friendship of Anna Kone and Maya Ishii-Peters (played by 32-year-old co-creators Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine), is both a totally absurd and excruciatingly realistic depiction of that stretch of adolescence. And then the stuff that actually, irrevocably changes your life comes in some startling way, from an unexpected angle, and is all the more scarring because of it. Endless hours are devoted to hyping yourself up for these supposedly major moments, getting worked into a frenzy for something that often turns out to be a nonevent: a party that’s a bust, a kiss that feels like nothing. ![]() ![]() It’s very teenage to declare - all hyperbole, zero irony - that your life is about to change forever. ![]()
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