In the early episodes of Netflix’s new coming-of-age series Penelope, it’s tempting to complain about what feels like unbearable cheesiness. The show, an eight-part retelling of Into the Wild (right down to a muttered monologue about the novel itself at the end of the series), co-written and executive produced by mumblecore favorite Mark Duplass, takes a while to settle into a less obnoxious wavelength. It is, ostensibly, a show for younger audiences, a sort of Freeform-approved version of Walden, starring a precocious blonde girl discovering herself and her relationship to nature, with all the discussions of faith and identity that entails. But what’s most striking about Duplass and co-writer-director Meg Eslyn’s show is that, like its main character, you end up absorbed by the quiet majesty of what’s in front of you.
When we first meet 16-year-old Penelope (Megan Stott, best known for playing a younger Reese Witherspoon in “Little Fires Everywhere,” which makes this feel like a prequel to “Wild”), she’s ecstatic at a silent party in the woods, music blasting in her headphones, but actually swaying silently among the people around her. Wordlessly, we see her estranged from her peers and the modern world she’s been born into. Only through these glimpses — and Stott’s deeply expressive face — do we get any clue as to why she wordlessly steals $500 worth of camping gear from a supply store and heads out onto the rails in the Washington woods. “I’m not running away,” she mutters in a hurried final voicemail to her parents. “I feel like I’m running … toward something.”
The fact that we know little about Penelope’s history before she becomes Jeremiah Johnson seems to be the point; she’s a blank slate, and while it makes it hard to latch onto her as a protagonist at first, the season’s deliberate pacing reveals that emptiness to be her fundamental flaw. She feels something missing of his teenage life, a terrifying chasm he hopes to fill by reconnecting with nature. His attraction to Mother Nature feels ineffable, unstoppable, a feeling he can’t quite put into words. Before long, he’s snuck into a national park in the Pacific Northwest without a camping permit and chosen to live off the land. “Hello, old friend,” he whispers to a moss-covered sequoia under which he sleeps at the end of the first episode. He’s finally home.
Naturally, that quest to survive in her chosen new home is the crux of “Penelope’s” quick 25-minute episodes, and Elsyn and Duplass, oddly, don’t put too much urgency or danger into it at first. Though she’s not accustomed to the ways of wilderness survival, she pushes through, thanks to a helpful wilderness survival guide and her own persistence. These elements often form the backbone of individual episodes: We’ll see her spend all of episode two, for example, learning how to light a campfire and pitch a tent (her final victory dance evokes Tom Hanks in “Cast Away”). She eventually upgrades her domicile to a makeshift log cabin during a twenty-minute montage midway through the series.
These episodes play out almost wordlessly; they’re meditative, the kind of thing best consumed with some relaxing substances in the body. Sometimes they can be too precious: dialogue is the kind of thing a teenager can do. wanted to Nathan M. Miller’s cinematography occasionally loses itself in a certain monotony, though it lends a surprisingly pastoral feel to the wooded setting. The score, by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurrians, overlaid with chatty vocal textures from Julia Piker, has to do a great job of carrying Penelope’s inner monologue. But it’s a pleasure to watch Stott carry such a thorough show on her back, while infusing Penelope with plenty of endearingly simple emotional beats. She mutters to herself, screams at the rain in frustration, tries so hard to interact with people her age and older. It’s a remarkably vulnerable performance, one in which Eslyn intelligently holds your attention.
She’s not alone throughout the show, though; “Penelope” crosses paths with several lost souls also searching for purpose. There’s the eccentric guitarist (Austin Abrams) who tries to help her before she reaches the reservation, the trio of religious teens (led by “The Penguin’s” Rhenzy Feliz) who also come to the woods to find themselves. Most notably, “Krisha” star Krisha Fairchild appears as an elderly conservationist who lives in the woods and is dedicated to protecting the reservation’s big trees from loggers. (When one is finally cut down, she mourns it like a murdered child.) All of these figures are vehicles for Penelope’s personal and spiritual journey, catalysts for her own quest for self-discovery.
It’s true that the premise itself defies belief: Skeptical viewers might yell at the screen that she should get away from a black bear cub she befriends in one episode, or wonder how she survives a particularly “The Revenant”-esque encounter later on. But “Penelope” doesn’t seem concerned with realism; it’s a flight of imagination, an odyssey not unlike the one in which its presumed namesake appears. It’s the classic fable of a spoiled protagonist fleeing his comfortable civilization to test himself in the wilderness. Plus, when you see how adorable That bear cub is… you’ll understand why Penelope fed him oatmeal, too.
Like many of Duplass’s series, “Penelope” was self-financed, and it’s hard to say whether it will get a second season. It’s slower, more glacially paced, and may be a bit too meditative for its intended young audience. (It seems like the kind of show adults think kids would like, when the only ones who probably would are the “lonely New York boys” of Girls5Eva.) But the series ends just as we learn that fair A little too much about Penelope’s past and family life, a necessary crossroads for this young woman’s maturation. Will she return to a world that may not miss her? Or will she remain in her more natural and dangerous state? The ideas and conversations that happen in “Penelope” are not thesis material, but they are basic, elemental questions about the human condition, and few shows like this one explore them with such emotional rawness.
The entire miniseries was screened for review and is currently streaming on Netflix.