Outside of his role as Pete Eckhart in FX’s The League, Mark Duplass is best known for a slew of projects squarely targeting adults, including Cyrus, Creep, and Room 104. His latest show is different. Penelope is a new coming-of-age teen drama series that Duplass co-created with Mel Eslyn, and all eight episodes are now available to stream.
As Duplass explained in a tweet earlier this week, he wrote all eight episodes of Penelope back in 2020. After shopping it around Hollywood, he couldn’t find any takers, so he paid for it himself. He then teamed up with Duplass Brothers Productions president Mel Eslyn, who directed every episode, and they eventually sold it to Netflix.
The result is a unique streaming show that Time says is “like nothing else on television.” In one of the show’s more favorable reviews from any critic, Time’s Judy Berman says that Penelope is “less about the destination than about the adventure, its challenges and its revelatory moments and the texture of a life pared back to basics.”
The show stars Megan Stott (Little Fires Everywhere) as a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t so much “run away” from home as she runs toward Cascade National Forest, where she plans to escape modern life by starting a new one in the wilderness.
The cast also includes Austin Abrams (Dash & Lily), Krisha Fairchild (Krisha), Rhenzy Feliz (The Penguin), Cynthia Geary (Going Home), and Barry O’Neil (Wild).
While there have been a limited number of reviews, they’ve been generally positive. Mashable says that the show “blooms from a place of quiet reflection,” and IndieWire finds it “refreshing to see an indie TV series forge its own identity, rather than try to ape the standard studio formula.” Basically, it’s trying something new, and that alone is exciting.
