Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play thirteen-year-old versions of themselves among real children, and the trick holds because neither of them is joking. It is funny, frequently painful, and two or three episodes are sketches stretched to episode length.
Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who created the series with Sam Zvibleman, play thirteen-year-old versions of themselves, Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone, starting middle school. Everyone around them is played by an actual child. That is a gimmick, and the title admits as much before you have pressed play. It works. The show is funny in the way that makes you hold a cushion in front of your face, and more often than we expected it stops being funny and simply hurts. We recommend it, with one caveat: it is ten episodes built on a single idea, and two or three of them show the strain.
The trick holds because neither woman is joking. Konkle plays Anna tall and stooped, hair tucked behind both ears, apologising before she has finished a sentence. Erskine gives Maya a bowl cut and a mouth that runs a full second ahead of her brain, and she can go from swagger to tears without a cut. Melissa Walker dresses them in butterfly clips, spaghetti-strap tops over t-shirts and jeans that ride too low, and they wear it all as their best clothes. The real children, Taj Cross’s Sam Zablowski chief among them, are shot in the same frame, and the directors, Zvibleman and Andrew DeYoung among them, are careful about where the adults’ hands and mouths go whenever a scene turns to kissing. The care is visible, and we did not mind that.
The three cinematographers, Bella Gonzales, Adam Silver and Andy Rydzewski, shoot it flat and bright, like a school photograph, with none of the golden haze that period comedy usually reaches for. Grace Alie’s production design gives Maya a cluttered house with her mother Yuki Ishii-Peters (Mutsuko Erskine) always at the edge of frame, and gives Anna a tidier, colder one where her parents Curtis Kone (Taylor Nichols) and Kathy Kone (Melora Walters) argue through the walls. Leo Birenberg’s score stays out of the way and lets the pop songs of the year do the remembering. The editors, five of them across the season, hold each embarrassment a beat longer than you want them to. That beat is the joke.
There is a scene at the end of the first episode where Maya, who has spent the day pretending not to mind what the boys have decided to call her, gets home and stops pretending. Erskine plays it with no laugh in it anywhere, and we realised we had stopped laughing some minutes before. It got at us because of the face. A real thirteen-year-old in that shot would have been a child being sad, which is sad enough. An adult in that shot is a memory, and we found we had one of our own.
Now the caveat. Several episodes are built on one situation, a music video, a sleepover, a school dance, and you can see the shape of the sketch under them: set-up, humiliation, hug. The writing staff is large, Gabe Liedman, Vera Santamaria and Stacy Osei-Kuffour are among the names, and when it reaches for the surreal the show loses its footing for a scene or two. The Kone marriage is well played by Nichols and Walters but arrives at the same argument each time it appears. And there were moments when we wanted the girls to be allowed one clean win. The show is more interested in the loss, and it knows the loss better.
The second season, fifteen episodes from 18 September 2020, is longer, sadder and less like a sketch show, which suggests the creators noticed what we did. Against the genre, this sits closer to the gentle end of the school comedy than a tagline calling it R-rated lets on. The 15 certificate is honest about the language. It undersells the tenderness.
Watch it two episodes at a time, at home, with someone who will not judge you for looking away. Anyone who was ever thirteen should be warned that it will find them.
