The real Maya and Anna speak about the future of their hit new show, 'PEN15' — and a conceivable Season 2.

Hulu's PEN15 is the most efficient display of the yr (do not @ me). The cringey but heartfelt comedy sequence is mainly like having a look in a replicate for any grownup woman who spent 2000 in the seventh grade. PEN15 completely digs into the uncomfortableness and awkwardness of middle faculty — bowl cuts, AIM display names, and primary boyfriends integrated. 

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Yet in all probability maximum surprisingly of all, display creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle are 31-year-olds who play 13-year-old variations of themselves, along a cast of exact tweens. And the end result isn't as jarring as one would expect — if truth be told, it's completely delightful.

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Thanks to hairy brows and prosthetic braces, the 2 women shipping themselves back to their trauma-ridden pasts and arrange to play 13-year-olds in a way that is unusually convincing. "[PEN15 is] really a love story between these two characters," Maya said about the new Hulu display in an interview with Bustle. 

"It's about these two best friends who are going through this horrible time, but they have each other, so it's also the best time of their lives."

Now that Season 1 is up on Hulu in its complete 10 episode goodness, viewers are filled with questions about what's subsequent for the display that reminds us of that horrible schoolyard prank.

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First off, what does PEN15 imply?

PEN15 would possibly no longer ring a bell should you have been a) no longer in heart college within the early aughts or b) lucky enough to be one of the vital cool youngsters this prank wasn't used to ridicule. But for those that need a refresher, Pen15 was once a grade college prank that capitalized at the feeling of FOMO ahead of we even had a word for it.

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As Urban Dictionary explains, (*2*) The invitation would go like this: "I'm in the Pen club. I'm Pen 14, you can be Pen 15" — the comic story, of course, being that they would finally end up with a dirty phrase written in metal Gel Roll at the back of their hand.

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Will there be a Season 2?

Yes! Hulu just announced a slew of recent displays and renewed some fan favorites of this yr. "Grab your rainbow gel pens," the streaming service tweeted. "Season 2 of Pen15 is happening." What's much more spectacular is that this show got renewed only 3 quick months after its preliminary liberate.

And Season 2 promises 14 episodes, up four episodes from Season 1. A go back date has not but been set, but duo Maya and Anna were ready to safe "sizable pay raises," consistent with The Hollywood Reporter, with the intention to go back for a reprise. Get it, ladies!

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What will Season 2 be about? The show's creators have hinted it would be "darker" and "more mature."

Although Season 1 of PEN15 works lovely smartly as a standalone collection, there were a few in brief touched-on subjects that will no doubt be explored if the display gets renewed for a Season 2. But something's for sure: the characters will never age out of the 7th grade.

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"Before we even pitched the show," Maya defined to The Hollywood Reporter, "we had set up arcs for the characters because as of now the goal is that they stay in seventh grade forever. In that case you're like, 'Oh well then how do the characters grow?' So we tried to establish that early on, in the first season, they're a bit more innocent and playing with more childhood versus teenagers."

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"Then in the second season," she persevered, "maybe they experiment more with drugs or we go through things that happened to us later on in middle school and then high school and just place that in the frame of seventh grade."

Two major plot points are going to require some addressing. First, the matter of Anna's oldsters' divorce, which the true Anna Konkle says was once inspired instantly from her own formative years.

"That scene was the best that I could do," she recalled to THR. "It was straight out of how I remembered it. There's that masochistic element to it because we're writing this for ourselves. If there is a second season, there's a lot of stuff we talked about [including.]"

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The 2d level is Maya's duration, which she's gotten however is these days hiding from her BFF, Anna. "We were [able to save the majority of that storyline] for the second season," Maya explained. "For now it's revealed, but not to Anna."

"We were trying to shape and have them be more innocent — at least for the first season. We're going to explore more mature, darker content in the second season. The girls will possibly experiment more."

Whether that implies smoking more cigarettes of their backyards, after all hitting the apple pipe with Maya's brother, or strolling things back with Flymiamibro AKA Sam, the girls are in for a treat. 

We're satisfied seventh grade ended, but even more glad we will be able to relive it during Anna and Maya's genius minds.

PEN15 is seriously unmissable. Catch Season 1 in its entirety on Hulu.

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