Abstract
The television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 are contemporary cringe comedies that foreground female experience. While the vast majority of cringe comedies employ documentary form and/or practice and speak insistently in the present tense, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 produce stories that not only unfold in the present, but also reframe the past, thereby building into their acts of narration, and by extension their cringe esthetics, a retrospective temporality. In light of themes taken up by both series—themes related to mental health and the construction of female identity and desire—this reframing has significant effects both politically and therapeutically. In this article I analyze the formal means by which a retrospective temporality of cringe is achieved in these series, including the use of musical numbers in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and unconventional casting in PEN15, and I explore the various prosocial effects that temporality produces for the series’ characters, creators, and spectators.
Introduction
In one of the 157 musical numbers featured in The CW’s comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019), a cemetery security guard introduces the four women at the center of the series to a dance called “the cringe,” a clever riff on “the monster mash” referenced in Bobby Pickett’s famous song. After claiming that people are far more haunted by their personal histories than by supernatural forces, he sings about a transgression from his own past and then concludes, by way of the song’s chorus, “When that memory fills me with horror and dread, I do the cringe.” As he does so, the women sing along and perform in unison a sequence of stylized gestures that evoke, as per Dahl’s definition (2018, 8) of cringe, “the intense visceral reaction produced by an awkward moment.” Insofar as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is regularly described as a “cringe comedy,” this number functions metatextually, actively identifying the series with a subgenre that has proven so popular and prevalent since the turn of the century that it now constitutes “a global brand” (Schwanebeck 2021, 2). Yet as much as the number speaks to the subgeneric status of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and thus its commonality with a wide array of other texts, the mention of “memory” lays bare something that is relatively rare within the context of cringe comedic television: the tendency to tie cringe to a retrospective temporality such that it shares ground with, while also differing appreciably from, phenomena such as nostalgia and regret. In this article, I take my cue from “the cringe” as I examine the retrospective temporality of two series—Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and another cringe comedy that focusses on female experience, Hulu’s PEN15 (2019–2021)—both of which are television series that tell, or even more to the point retell, stories about cringeworthy events by reflecting on them from a formal and temporal remove. In the process, they reframe those events in the spirit of a care ethics that “emphasizes human interdependence and vulnerability” (Robinson 2015, 295).
Cringe Comedy in the Present
In 2017, Zinoman began a New York Times article by asking, “Has a more significant television subgenre been born this century than cringe comedy?” While the implied answer to this rhetorical question (“no”) is debatable, Zinoman’s assumption about the salience of cringe comedy is well founded: between reviews of individual series, “best of” lists, think pieces, clip compilations, and even one March Madness-style “Cringe Bracket,” 1 popular discourse about contemporary television, and contemporary visual culture more broadly, has not only consolidated cringe comedy as a recognizable subgenre, but also testified, and in turn contributed, to its immense significance both culturally and socially. To a certain extent, academic discourse has followed suit, subjecting the same developments in comedy to analysis, but under a variety of umbrellas, including not only “cringe comedy,” but also the comedy of “awkwardness” (Duncan 2017; Kotsko 2010), “embarrassment” (Jacobi 2016), and “discomfort” (Holm 2017). While these various categories do not map perfectly on to each other, there is among them a sizable area of overlap in two regards: first, the textual examples discussed, with The Office—both the UK (2001–2003) and US (2005–2013) versions— being cited more frequently than any other series, and, second, certain defining features identified, the most significant of which is a tendency to pair cringe with humor, and thus tension with release, through comedy that hinges on the violation of norms governing social interactions. While these violations are frequently benign, as per McGraw and Warren’s theory (2010), they are nonetheless ripe with potential awkwardness and, in turn, embarrassment.
Another defining feature about which there is relative consensus relates to the proximal positioning of the audience for cringe comedy vis-à-vis the world featured therein. Hye-Knudsen (2018, 28) explains this positioning effectively when he writes that, in comparison to the embarrassment humor of a series like Fawlty Towers (1975–1979), cringe humor works by “decreasing [the] variables of psychological distance in order also to evoke high levels of vicarious embarrassment.” In other words, in cringe comedy there is typically something plausible (rather than absurd) and relatable (rather than remote) about the situations represented, and for this reason spectators react to them with not only laughter but also discomfort of some kind, be it borne of antipathy, sympathy, or empathy. In his analysis of “uncomfortable humor,” Holm (2017, 89) describes this plausibility and relatability in terms of “an orientation towards the real” and then posits three possible ways of achieving it: “the formal adoption of documentary conventions, the extra-textual assurance of non-fiction status or a broader orientation toward the lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text.”
Interestingly, in the scholarly literature about cringe comedy, a tremendous amount of attention has been paid to the first two of these ways, or rather to the way they work in service of the third; in other words, discussion of cringe comedy’s “orientation toward the lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text” has typically been subsumed by considerations of that text’s reliance upon the form and/or practice of documentary, with its privileged relationship to a reality defined by contingency. While Holm’s own work constitutes one example of this tendency, another is the work of Pansy Duncan. In an essay on the “aesthetics of the awkward,” Duncan (2017, 38) inextricably links cringe comedy and documentary when she argues that “cringe comedy relies on many of the aural and visual cues of cinema vérité to blur the boundaries between the comic and the non-comic world.” Similarly Middleton (2013, 2), in his tellingly titled book Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship, writes, “Even as we can better understand documentary film through the lens of awkwardness, awkward moments can be understood in a sense as documentary moments. They are moments when an encounter feels too real.” He expands on this notion of “too real” by equating it with “unplanned,” “unscripted,” “unmediated,” “immediate,” and, finally, that which takes “unexpected and often unruly forms” (2–4) and by analyzing examples of it from a wide range of texts that qualify as either documentary, mockumentary, or reality-based media.
Within television studies, this association between cringe and documentary makes perfect sense. The various series that not only epitomize cringe comedy in the popular imagination, but also have forced a scholarly reconceptualization of the esthetics of comedic television, are ones that feature, at least in part, “life caught unawares” or ones that strategically press the formal conventions of documentary in service of fiction. On the one hand, epitomizing the former of these two types are the genre-defying series wherein an improvisational comedian stages interactions with actual historical subjects, or what Nichols (2001) calls “social actors,” who are usually unaware of the set-up. As suggested by nicknames they have earned, “Sultan of Squirm” Sacha Baron Cohen (Edelstein 2006) and “King of Cringe” Nathan Fielder (Johnson 2022) are responsible for creating two of the most historically prominent examples of this kind of television series: Da Ali G Show (2000–2004) laid the groundwork for Baron Cohen’s further character work in both film and television as Borat and Brüno, and Nathan for You (2013–2017) gave Fielder the opportunity to perform an alter-ego that he would continue to hone subsequently in The Rehearsal (2022–Present). On the other hand, there are the dozens of series that employ the style that Mills (2004, 75) has labeled “comedy verite,” wherein “the visual characteristics of verite have been adopted by sitcom for comedic purposes.” In the case of the much discussed The Office, the adoption of such characteristics is a direct result of the fact that the daily operations of a local branch of a paper company are being filmed for the purposes of some kind of broadcast. In many contemporaneous or subsequent cringe comedies, including Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–Present), Arrested Development (2003–2019), The Thick of It (2005–2012), and The Inbetweeners (2008–2010), there is no such narrative pretext, but the characteristics of vérité persist in the form of handheld camerawork, disjunctive editing, naturalistic lighting, and a relative lack of nondiegetic music. 2
By virtue of the relationship they forge to documentary, be it in spirit or style, all of the series mentioned above speak insistently in the present tense. The work of Baron Cohen and Fielder depends on interactions that are not scripted, but are rather driven by the antics of a comedian-provocateur and the unpredictable reactions they elicit; thus they take spontaneous shape in real time, on a moment-to-moment basis. Similarly, in series like The Office, the formal attributes of documentary serve not only to produce the impression of events that are grounded in reality, but also to catch the spectator up in the flow of those events as they unfold continuously. Moreover, in the subset of “comedy verite” that features a stand-up comedian playing a version of themselves—as in the eponymous Louie (2010–2015) and Maron (2013–2016), for example—this present-tense temporality is thrown into fresh relief to the extent that it differs from the retrospective temporality of a stand-up routine, which “provides reflexive commentary from a temporal distance” (Wanzo 2016, 37). It is against this backdrop that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 emerge as relatively unique: folding elements of reflexive commentary and temporal distance into scripted series, they display an “orientation towards the real” that is not bound up with nonfiction.
Acts of Reframing and Redress
As much as cringe comedic television, and in turn scholarship on it, foregrounds the forms and practices associated with documentary media, there are exceptions on both counts. For example, Hess (2021, 3) begins her analysis of Flowers (2016–2018) by claiming that a “specific emphasis on its own narrativity is perhaps what most clearly separates Flowers from ‘traditional’ cringe comedies” and then notes that the series does not “adopt the format of a mockumentary,” “aim for a cinéma vérité aesthetic,” or “break the fourth wall” through acknowledgment of the film crew. The same can be said of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15. Indeed, both series self-reflexively foreground the acts of narration in which they engage and thereby cordon off the comic worlds they create rather than, to quote Duncan (2017, 38) again, “blur[ring] the boundaries between the comic and the non-comic world.” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does so largely by combining comedy with conventions from the musical, which Horn (2019, 128) identifies as “the genre supposedly least suited to television’s serial mode of realistic storytelling”: every episode features as least two highly stylized song and dance numbers that provide insight into the subjectivity of protagonist Rebecca Bunch, who is played by series co-creator Rachel Bloom. PEN15, in comparison, draws attention to its production through unconventional casting: even though protagonists Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone are thirteen years old, they are played by series co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who were in their early thirties when the series premiered. In the case of both series, this fundamental formal component lays the groundwork for other, more subtle and/or isolated deviations from an esthetic grounded in verisimilitude, be they part of a highly stylized mise-en-scène, as in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, or expressionistic interludes, as in PEN15.
At the same time that the two series lay bare their acts of narration through multiple formal means and thereby share ground with a series like Flowers, they also, in the process, do something relatively singular, at least within the context of cringe comedy: they produce stories that not only unfold in the present, but also reframe the past, thereby building into those acts of narration, and by extension the series’ cringe esthetics, a retrospective temporality. In the context of their discussion of female-centered dramedies that employ such esthetics, Havas and Sulimma (2020, 83) note, “cringe typically requires viewers’ affective distance: we do not cringe with but at characters”; the primary reason for this is because those characters engage in cringeworthy behavior while exhibiting no self-awareness. Yet just like the song lyric from which this article gets its title—“When that memory fills me with horror and dread, I do the cringe”—Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 posit subjects who are self-aware, at least in retrospect. As such they are capable of recognizing their own transgressions with a cringe while simultaneously creating space for a more prosocial response through an act of creative production. As a result, when we cringe at Rebecca on the one hand or Maya and Anna on the other, we also cringe with them and we do so to generative ends. In short, when that memory fills us—vicariously, as viewers—with horror and dread, we do the cringe, but we also—again, vicariously—engage in an act of reframing and redress.
To a certain extent this complex spectatorial position serves a political purpose. Like the other female-centered series that Havas and Sulimma (2020) discuss, namely Lena Dunham’s Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, and Issa Rae’s Insecure, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 infuse cringe comedy with “politicized cultural value” (89) insofar as that which is cringe worthy is often “their characters’ violations of social and cultural taboos, many of which are particularly constituted as gendered expectations about appropriate enactments of femininity” (83). Collectively these series demonstrate the manifold nature of those gender expectations and the numerous ideals that women may try, but fail, to embody. That said, what the protagonists of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 have in common is that they all aspire, more than anything else, to a specifically feminine ideal of “breeziness” as per a famous episode of the sitcom Friends 3 ; that is, they seek to project an image that is casual, confident, and cool, yet they repeatedly fall short of this goal. Due to mental health challenges in the case of Rebecca and the “storm and stress” of adolescence in the case of Maya and Anna (Hall 1904), they are instead considered excessive in their feelings, their desires, and their desperation to both fit in and stand out, especially in the eyes of the boys or men to whom they are attracted. As that excess erupts, it may induce a cringe but it, in a spirit of both sympathy and critique, lays bare the patriarchal norms that create the conditions for that cringe as well.
The pilots of both series illustrate this well. In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca performs “The Sexy Getting Ready Song” by pairing sultry vocals and choreographed dance moves with undignified imagery of the grooming, and resulting pain, required in preparation for a date: among others things, she wincingly tweezes her eyebrows and nose, pinches her eyelid in an eyelash curler, burns herself with a curling iron, and draws blood while waxing her butt crack. Further heightening the awkward absurdity of Rebecca’s beauty regimen is a moment in the song when her breathy invitation to “see how the guys get ready” introduces a cutaway to her date, Greg (Santino Fontana), fast asleep on a couch. In the first episode of PEN15, Maya and Anna’s most cringeworthy behavior is likewise a direct response to a situation dictated by patriarchal expectations of women and girls. After Maya is declared U.G.I.S., or “Ugliest Girl in School,” she and Anna attempt to pick a fight with one of the boys responsible for the slur. While tentative at first in their attempts to intimidate him both physically and verbally, they gradually get bolder until Maya takes things too far, engaging in an act that is arguably even more insensitive than calling someone ugly: to the horrified silence of everyone watching, she suggests that the boy was responsible for his father’s recent death while pumping her fists and flexing her body in awkward imitation of a pro-wrestling taunt.
Another purpose served by the spectatorial position cultivated by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15—again, one wherein cringe co-exists with a more prosocial response—is a therapeutic one. Indeed one of the most unusual attributes of both series is how earnest they are: as much as they capitalize on the comedic potential of cringe-inducing behavior, they are deeply invested in normalizing their protagonists and charting a developmental trajectory that culminates in community, compassion, and care. In this way, they differ markedly from some of the women’s work with which they, as just mentioned, share political ground. Specifically, Wanzo (2016) posits a category called “precarious-girl comedy” that is not coterminous with cringe comedy, but intersects with it in a couple of significant ways. First, the two texts that Wanzo uses to flesh out the features of precarious girl comedies are part of the emerging cringe canon: Girls and Issa Rae’s web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011), which paved the way for Insecure. Second, the precarious girl category also accommodates easily certain other female-centered cringe comedies, including, for example, Colleen Ballinger’s Haters Back Off (2016–2017) and Sarah Gubbins and Joey Soloway’s I Love Dick (2016). According to Wanzo, the defining characteristic of precarious girl comedies is an unambivalent acceptance of one’s own abjection; in Wanzo’s words, “the protagonist embraces the idea that she repels others as a sign of her individuation,” and, moreover, of “a more evolved self” (Wanzo 2016, 29).
As Nussbaum (2017) notes in the context of a review of I Love Dick, such self-acceptance can be quite subversive: she identifies numerous contemporary series (including not only I Love Dick but also Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) that create “a sturdy slapstick of feminine thirst” and, in so doing, manage to “turn debasement into a tool of liberation.” Yet as subversive as self-acceptance can be, it is, in Wanzo’s analysis, tied to an experience of alienation, failure, and the limited prospects that result from economic and political precarity. Albeit in racially differentiated ways—Girls associates abjection with narcissism, privilege, and immaturity, while Misadventures “embraces awkwardness as the height of black abjection” (Wanzo 2016, 46)—both series are woman-centered sitcoms that thwart “the genre’s narrative tendency to support a domestic status quo or move women toward marriage and greater professional fulfillment” (33), all while “mak[ing] endless alienation a source of humor” (29). In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15, by contrast, self-acceptance is inextricably bound up with optimism about the future and an acceptance of, and affinity with, others. Indeed, both series, as will become evident when I discuss them in turn below, end in an exceedingly hopeful manner, gesturing toward a diegetic future of communal possibility while simultaneously and self-reflexively drawing attention to their own existence as a realization of that possibility.
Play It Again, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
One way that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend cultivates a retrospective temporality is with its focus on a character—again, Rebecca Bunch as played by Rachel Bloom—who is haunted by her past and filled with regret. At the start of the series, which comprises four seasons in total, Rebecca is a successful but unhappy lawyer in New York City. On the same day she is made partner at her law firm, she bumps into her first love, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), whom she has not seen since he broke up with her at the end of a romantic summer at camp ten years prior. Taking their chance encounter as a sign, she decides to quit her job and follow Josh by moving across the country to the suburb of West Covina, California. Once there she joins a new law firm and begins methodically insinuating herself into Josh’s life. In the second season her efforts at (re)winning Josh’s affection prove successful and from there their relationship moves in a variety of different directions: they get engaged; she cheats on him; he leaves her at the alter; she declares him her sworn enemy; they rekindle their friendship; they become roommates; and they flirt with the idea of getting back together. All the while the series develops Rebecca’s ties, be they familial, friendly, professional, or romantic, with a host of other characters as well, all of whom not only play a role in her life, but also participate in various musical numbers in the capacity of principal or ensemble players.
One the most distinctive aspects of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is its deliberate dramatic arc, which involves not only Rebecca’s relationships with Josh and others but also a profound development of Rebecca as a character and, by extension, the series’s broader themes. In a nutshell, the first two seasons feature Rebecca, often with the assistance of her best friend Paula (Donna Lynne Champlain), engaged in a vast array of cringe-inducing and ethically troublesome activities in her pursuit of Josh, including invading his privacy, sabotaging his relationships, and lying to him and others repeatedly; moreover, she does all these things while denying culpability on the grounds articulated in the second season theme song: “I’m just a girl in love. I can’t be held responsible for my actions.” From the pilot onward, the series interrogates this alibi, especially insofar as it subtends popular assumptions about romance, femininity, and “craziness.” With the third season, however, the series upends it entirely as Rebecca is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and begins an active treatment regimen that involves therapy, workbooks, antidepressant medication, and Rebecca’s ongoing attempts to make amends. Once Crazy Ex-Girlfriend begins seriously foregrounding issues of mental health, it revisits many of Rebecca’s prior misdeeds, be they ones represented in the first two seasons or ones that belong to an even more distant past that gets dredged up as fodder for blackmail—specifically, Rebecca’s affair with her married professor during law school, her commitment of arson when he ended their relationship, and her subsequent institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital. As a result, when Crazy Ex-Girlfriend showcases its musical number about “the cringe” early on in the fourth season, in an episode fittingly titled “I Am Ashamed” (S04E02), it does so in the shadow of this complicated personal history.
A second way that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend produces a retrospective temporality is by repeatedly compelling a rereading of prior textual moments in light of new information. To a certain extent this formal strategy is bound up with the dramatic turn taken in the third season: as Horn (2019, 138) notes, by “grounding [Rebecca’s borderline personality disorder] symptoms in flashbacks to scenes from previous seasons,” the series, among other things, “forces audiences to reconsider their own prior readings of these scenes.” Yet it is the songs featured in the series, rather than certain narrative events, that are most subject to reinterpretation. For instance, each season has a different theme song, and at one (or more) point in every season, some element from that theme song is reproduced within the context of the plot in such a way that the song suddenly demands further consideration and accrues added dimension. Take, for example, the description of Rebecca as “just a girl in love” who “can’t be held responsible for [her] actions” mentioned above. Initially this description is sung in the context of the second season’s Busby Berkeley-inspired credit sequence, as part of a jaunty and up-tempo song in which Rebecca also identifies herself as “certifiably cute and adorably obsessed.” With its repetition in the second season finale (S02E13), however, Rebecca’s obsessive behavior is uncoupled from its cheeky rendition: in a flashback to the hearing related to Rebecca’s act of arson, her mother employs the familiar description in a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt to pre-empt any legal consequences, and in so doing she lays it bare as fallacy.
What such moments achieve on isolated occasions becomes a global strategy in the series finale (S04E17) when Rebecca reveals the logic of the musical interludes that have been integral throughout the series’s duration. In that episode she is in the middle of a conversation with Paula when she falls silent and starts staring off into space. In response, Paula calls her back to reality, notes the frequency with which Rebecca disengages in this manner, and then asks, “What’s happening when you do that?” Reluctantly Rebecca reveals her secret: “When I stare off into space I’m imagining myself in a musical number.” She then invites Paula into her imagination, which is rendered as a black box theater showcasing costumes that were featured in some of the series’s most memorable musical numbers and that represent, for Rebecca, “all of the identities that I’ve tried to fit into.” While Rebecca is embarrassed by her admission, Paula finds it inspiring, arguing that insofar as Rebecca’s songs help her process aspects of her external reality, they are a means of figuring out who she is. At Paula’s enthusiastic urging, Rebecca dedicates herself to spending the next year writing down the many songs in her head, and in the final scene of the series, she is preparing to debut them for an audience. While that scene ends the very moment that Rebecca opens her mouth to begin singing, it nonetheless, in both spirit and sensibility, brings the series full circle, back to the pilot when Rebecca breaks into song for the very first time.
What ultimately prepares Rebecca to both revisit her past and process her present in song is her understanding that doing so is a way to manage her disorder, to learn self-acceptance, and to connect with others. In a monolog that contains references to two theme songs—that is, those from the first season, when Rebecca insists her situation is more “nuanced” than that of a stereotypical “crazy ex-girlfriend,” and the fourth season, when the audience is invited to “meet Rebecca”—she prefaces her performance by explaining the relevance of her song writing activity: I don’t know yet if what I’m doing is any good, but all I know is that I can finally show the outside world what’s been inside me this whole time, all of it, all of the nuances and grey areas. It’s not just about the act of writing. It’s about how when I’m doing that, when I’m telling my own story, for the first time in my life I am truly happy. It’s like I just met myself, like I just met Rebecca. I came to this town to find love, and I did. I love every person in this room, each and every one of you.
What allows the series’s audience, in a parallel operation, to similarly revisit, and review through another lens, the past is the way Crazy Ex-Girlfriend partakes of the “replay culture” that Klinger (2010) associates with cult fandom. In addition to replaying the entire series by way of streaming platforms, diehard fans have been able to consume repeatedly, and perhaps even reproduce, its songs through multiple means. First, the videos of the musical numbers from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are featured on Bloom’s personal YouTube channel alongside the music videos, including “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” and “Nobody Will Watch the F*cking Tony Awards with Me,” that made Bloom a viral phenomenon from 2010 onward. Second, sheet music for a wide selection of those songs can be downloaded from Bloom’s website, racehldoesstuff.com. Finally, the entire principal cast participated in a live show that toured to ten American cities in 2018, at the conclusion of the third season, and then returned to the stage the following year for two performances at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles (which were filmed for the purposes of a concert special that was aired immediately after the series finale) and one performance at Radio City Musical Hall in New York.
Seeing Double in PEN15
Across its two seasons PEN15 follows best friends Maya and Anna as they navigate seventh grade and the many changes— physical, emotional, social, and familial— they undergo in that period of time. While some of those changes, such as the divorce of Anna’s parents, constitute narrative throughlines that extend across multiple episodes, many of them are relatively contained, making for a series that is more episodic than serial in form. Within this context the series is capable of broaching a wide range of new experiences, all of which have cringeworthy potential, from discovering masturbation and experimenting with alcohol to flirting with boys and pursuing, in vain, friendship with the popular girls. Indeed, PEN15 makes clear why Dahl (2018, 13) begins her book Cringeworthy by describing the process of reading excerpts from her teenage diary aloud when auditioning for a Mortified Live show 4 and then commenting, “I’ve come to think of my inner teen as the unseen instigator of the awkwardness I still feel in my adult life”: for her, and presumably many others, adolescence is ground zero for the phenomenon she goes on to examine, the psychology of the awkward and cringeworthy.
To a certain extent the reason we cringe with, as well as at, Maya and Anna is the same reason we, according to Havas and Sulimma (2020, 87), cringe with Issa (Issa Rae), the protagonist of Insecure: because PEN15 occasionally produces Maya as a “racialized subject of cringe” and thereby “shifts cringe from the central character onto her environment.” In other words, at various moments throughout PEN15, and with the entire episode “Posh” (S01E06), that which is most cringe-inducing are the racist microaggressions targeted at Maya because of her Japanese parentage. (Maya’s mother, who is played by Erskine’s actual mother, Mutsuko Erskine, is Japanese while Maya’s father is white.) In “Posh,” for example, Maya and Anna are doing a school project with three classmates wherein they are pretending to be the Spice Girls for a commercial about osteoporosis. Despite her stated desire to be Posh, Maya is forced, on the grounds of her racial identity, to play the role of Scary and then, adding insult to injury, the role of a servant named Guido as well. Yet unlike Issa, who “expresses exasperated bewilderment at the behavior of those in her social environment” and thereby “mirrors the viewer’s own assumed/expected disdain of such actions” (Havas and Sulimma 2020, 87), Maya and Anna respond in ways that compound the cringe effect: Maya not only plays along with but throws herself into the roles assigned to her while Anna later attempts to atone for her complicity in the situation by launching a naïve and ill-conceived campaign to end racism that backfires, further marginalizing her best friend.
The other reason we cringe with, as well as at, Maya and Anna, and that we do so on a consistent rather than occasional basis, is the retrospective temporality that PEN15 shares with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Yet as opposed to the latter series, which cultivates intermittent acts of retrospection by providing prompts to replay moments, be it via memory or remediation, in order to see them anew, PEN15 produces its retrospective temporality in a more ongoing fashion as it speaks in the present tense and past tense simultaneously. As already mentioned, a defining attribute of PEN15 is the fact that its two adolescent protagonists are played by their adult creators and counterparts, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle. While this unconventional casting choice is much touted in reviews, interviews, and publicity materials, the series itself also draws attention to it in multiple ways. First, Maya and Anna, as played by Erskine and Konkle, look noticeably different from their onscreen peers, almost all of whom are played by age-appropriate actors and thus tend to be, at the very least, shorter than the pair. Second, comprising the opening credit sequence of each episode is a montage of archival snapshots featuring Erskine and Konkle at the age of thirteen; as recognizable as the girls in these images may be, the dramatized version of Maya and Anna look noticeably different from them as well. Third, the age discrepancy between Erskine and Konkle and their co-stars mandates that their engagement in certain acts of intimacy be creatively implied rather than directly represented, usually through analytical editing and framing that allows for the use of body doubles. For example, Anna’s first kiss (S01E08) is represented by way of a sequence of over twenty shots, the vast majority of which are extreme close-ups that serve either to isolate Anna and her boyfriend, Brendan (Brady Allen), from each other via shot-reverse shot logic or to anonymize the two mouths filling the frame while pressed together. Similarly, when Anna and Maya go to second base with Brandt (S01E10), their physical contact is limited to shots that suggest Brandt’s presence by way of a disembodied hand as it touches the girls’ breasts or the back of a head at the center of a planimetric image of two-handed petting.
Yet at the same time that PEN15 contains references to the age difference between Maya and Anna on the one hand and Erskine and Konkle on the other, it is possible, as critic Fienberg (2020) notes in regard to the second season, “to forget, if only occasionally, that Erskine and Konkle are executing a high-wire stunt.” In part this is due to textual factors. First, the actresses never treat their roles as a gimmick or joke and instead play them straight, often painfully so. Second, in keeping with the metaphor of a high wire stunt, the series regularly shifts its weight, so to speak, in order to maintain a balance between naturalism and self-reflexivity: for example, by the second season, when greater awareness of the series and its creators makes it more difficult for spectators to suspend disbelief, Anna and Maya are paired intimately with boyfriends (Steve and Derrick) played by actors (Chau Long and Bill Kottkamp) who are old enough that the conspicuous techniques described above are not necessary. In addition to textual factors, however, the spectator’s occasional—or, better yet, partial—ability to see Erskine and Konkle as adolescent is due to a claim that Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004, 165) makes in reference to stage productions wherein an actor plays the same character at different ages, only one of which is commensurate with their actual age: “When actors play younger, we are willing to see double” (emphasis in original). PEN15 differs from such stage productions insofar as it is mediated rather than live and any knowledge of what Erskine and Konkle look like when acting their real age is borne of extratextual materials rather than the text itself. That said, Gullette’s larger argument is nonetheless on point since she suggests that when an actor plays younger, there is a sense in which their body, through both sense memories and default behavior, still bears the traces of their younger self (166); in contrast, she identifies playing older as “a question of ‘passing’” and thus “much harder” (168). What Erskine and Konkle do exceptionally well is build on the traces of their younger selves in order to create performances that are convincing, especially when contextualized in the world the series meticulously and nostalgically recreates: that of junior high school and suburban America in the early 2000s. Between posture, gesture, and tone of voice on the one hand and costuming, hair, and orthodontics on the other, Konkle and Erskine embody (their) early adolescence in a credible manner.
As a result of the way PEN15 uses form to both draw attention to and disavow issues raised by its casting, the series proves distancing and absorbing at the same time. In turn, this duality, or invitation to see double, creates the conditions of possibility for the complex spectatorial position discussed earlier, particularly for an adult spectator who has already gone through the process of growing up, which is, as Lewkowich (2021, 27) notes, “inescapably hard to recognize except in retrospect.” That is, while Crazy Ex-Girlfriend stages cringing at and with as successive acts across its four season arc, PEN15 encourages us to cringe at and with Maya and Anna simultaneously, identifying with them as both characters and creators, as they live and relive certain awkward adolescent experiences and the vulnerability they engender. When Erskine and Konkle describe the process of reliving those experiences, many of which are taken directly from their personal histories, they use therapeutic language. In an interview with Nakamura (2019), the two women describe the act of revisiting their thirteen-year-old selves as “masochistic,” but also “freeing,” “liberating,” “cathartic,” and “strangely healing.” Moreover, Erskine in particular notes the following: Other people, after this show came out, would reach out and say, “Yeah, that happened to me too,” or, “I felt that same way.” So, we felt less alone. I felt like I got some closure from sharing the things that I felt so scared to share.
As much as this statement underscores the ways she and Konkle benefited from sharing their experiences with an audience, it also makes clear that those benefits are reciprocal, with fans of the show feeling less alone as well. Moreover, to the extent that those fans are aware of the series’s retrospective temporality and thereby see double when they look at Maya and Anna, they can read PEN15 in the terms suggested by Gullette (2004, 166): “The presence of an older self,” as a framing device within the text or, as in this case, within the text’s reception, “implies that the life course involves some progress.” Much like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, with its investment in Rebecca’s ongoing development, PEN15 charts a course of expanding possibility.
Conclusion
While I began this article with a scene from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I end it with one from PEN15—specifically, one from the final scene of the series finale (S02E15). In this scene Maya and Anna are looking through a photo album in order to reflect on a past they have shared with each other (and potentially with the viewers of PEN15 as well, as just discussed), but after thinking about the past for a bit, they then begin to speculate about what lies ahead: eighth grade, high school, university, and beyond.
Do you think that there’s ever a time that we won’t be friends?
Na, why would you say that?
No, I’m just saying ‘cause things happen, like. . ..
Like what things?
Like what if after college, you get a little bit depressed and I’m a little irresponsible and we’re both just so super dependent on each other and I can’t take it anymore and we don’t laugh like we used to.
Or, like, the things that we didn’t think would bother us about each other or our parents or the way we see the world starts to eat at us, and we just get, like, really cynical, and really just like wake up one day and we’re not friends.
At this point in the exchange the girls pause, contemplating the weight of a future that only their adult counterparts can conjure, before saying in unison and with growing buoyancy, “or. . .” and then detailing another possible path of development, one that includes sharing a dorm, having a double wedding and then a double divorce, raising their children together, and caring for each other in any way needed. In so doing they dwell in the kind of anticipatory temporality that is commonplace for teenagers imagining their adult futures, all while winkingly making reference to the central conceit of the series. At the same time, however, they also capture something that Lewkowich (2021, 28) claims: that if we understand memory as “creative, imaginary construction,” then we can also think about “the past as a resource for creating the future in similarly imaginative terms.” Insofar as both Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and PEN15 produce a retrospective temporality by reframing, and thereby creatively transforming, the cringeworthy past, they infuse cringe comedy with a capacity to build community, and to feel less alone, in both the present and the future. In effect, they propose a new prospect involving a communal and creative subject, one that could be summed up thusly: “When that memory fills us with horror and dread, we do the cringe—and then we make hay.”
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.