Back during this year’s South by Southwest, Mark Duplass and Duplass Brothers Productions CEO Mel Eslyn debuted a slate of independent TV shows – small productions in search of a TV station or streaming home.
In that six pack of series there was the first episode of a small, intimate show called Penelope. Written by Eslyn and Duplass and directed by Eslyn, it stars Megan Stott as Penelope, a 16-year-old girl who turns her back on modernity to live in the woods.
When Duplass and Eslyn screened those episodes, they didn’t really know what their futures would be. Last week Penelope debuted on Netflix, and while he was excited to have sold the show, before the episodes dropped Duplass was still nervous. “We’d like people to watch it.”
And watch it they have. Penelope premiered as one of the top 10 most watched TV shows on Netflix for the week.
“It feels like this movement has started – parent, schools, technology in schools, social media damage vis-à-vis mental health for teenagers and all of us.”
Mark Duplass: Here’s a couple of thoughts. Very few people have seen this still – we’ve shown it at select festivals – but we’ve discovered something about the show that’s interesting. Right around the time we were at SXSW, that was right around the time Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation came out, and since then it feels like this movement has started – parent, schools, technology in schools, social media damage vis-à-vis mental health for teenagers and all of us – and it feels like that has kind of taken off in a way that’s really interesting.
It really wasn’t what I planned the conversation around Penelope to be about. I thought it would in many ways be, “This is this really cool, meditative story about reconnecting with nature,” but it’s taken on something else, and it feels like more of a crusade than a television show for me, so I’ve become way more emotionally invested.
Every dinner I have is that conversation: “What are we doing?” “I’m not happy.” “This doesn’t work.” “I want to throw my phone in the fucking trash can.” It’s weird.
AC: It feels like everyone is having that thought at the same time.
MD: It feels that way to me. We’ve been making things for 20 years, and what I’ve come to discover as an artist is that you can’t time anything. A lot of times in this business when you think, “Oh, the bromance comedy is working really well, so I’ll write one of those,” and by the time you do it it’s passed. So all I have is my gut. All I have is my instinct, and something in my instinct four years ago, when this was less of a conversation and we were more worried about the pandemic, was telling me to write this story.
I really didn’t know why. Of course, I feel some connection to it. Of course, I hate my phone like everyone else, and I fantasize about being Penelope, but in the last six months, the way that this conversation has galvanized, it feels bigger, and I’m so grateful to be part of this conversation. Because I have a 16-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old daughter, and they both hate their phones. They’ll be the first ones to tell you. “We’re stuck. We need them. We’re slaves to them.” And we feel that, and I’ve never had a conversation like this, that keeps continuing over and over again, where we’ve identified something that makes us miserable, and we don’t do anything about it. It’s weird.
Mel Eslyn: It’s kind of like when Mark went a little more public with his mental health. It’s something so personal, and you put it out there and everyone’s like, “Oh, me too.” It’s set up to become a bigger conversation, and we happened to make it at a timing when everyone’s starting to go “me too.”
AC: The pandemic played a role in that because phones were people’s only connection to other humans, especially for that first year. And then we came out of the pandemic and we’re looking at this thing and going, “Why are you still here?” But we have our own personal culpability in that relationship.
MD I don’t have email on my phone. That’s my new thing. I’m not allowed to email on my phone. If I want to email, I do it a few times a day, and I go to my computer. And I did that for two days and fell off the wagon. It’s so crazy.
ME: For me, it was notifications. A few years ago I was like, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I have to run the company and I have to always be available,” and then I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna turn off these notifications that pop up every second telling me I have email,” and when I got to check my email it’s with purpose, and I can focus on it.
AC: Slack is the antichrist.
MD: Exactly! And while I know that the story of Penelope is not necessarily a model that everyone can follow for a happy life, and it is an extreme example of that, I do feel we’re seeing these waves of people saying “Let’s just put our phones down for 48 hours, and let’s get out into the woods.” I have incorporated that a lot into my life. I’m really into backpacking and hiking, and I have found that this extremism that I feel of “maybe I need to chuck it all away,” well, actually, going away for 72 hours does quite a bit for you. If anything, I hope that Penelope can inspire people to do this in dribs and drabs.
ME: It’s hard, because we don’t want it to sound like we’re saying the show is about throwing your cell phones away, because that is a wish fulfillment. It’s also about slowing down and listening to yourself and going outside. These phones that are mini-internet devices just play a part in that, but they’re not the only thing.
MD: To that point, I didn’t find any success as a creative until I stopped my brain and listened to my instincts, and followed what something deep inside me was telling me to do. I think that we don’t trust ourselves in many ways, and one thing I love about Penelope is that she felt something about the way she was living was wrong. She really had a hard time verbally getting her head around it but she trusts it, and I think we’ve gotten away from that.
AC: There are 10,000 characters you could use to explore these issues. What was it that made you write this around Penelope?
MD: Something was telling me that she was a 16-year-old girl. She came to me in a vision, and I’ve learned to trust that lightning bolt, and I’ve learned to not question it with my brain, because my brain will get in the way. “Oh, maybe I should write it closer to home.” “Maybe I should I write it for this demographic.” Because I am a producer and a businessman, and if I let that little man in during that special time, he’s not good for the process. So I just went with that instinct, and hoped that I would learn or Penelope would teach me eventually why she asked to be in the show.
I did learn a few things in the process. The first is that I wanted [my daughters] to be able to see a role model that was different from what they see, it wasn’t the ladies from Gossip Girl and it wasn’t the ladies from Euphoria, it wasn’t the young ladies from The Summer I Turned Pretty. It was a different kind of role model, and I wanted that specifically.
ME: When Mark brought me Penelope and went, “It’s about a 16-year-old-girl,” I went, “Oh, man, that’s perfect.” Because that’s the age when we define ourselves and are being told we have to define ourselves. It’s this discovery, and it’s this time when we’re listening to ourselves and not realizing how important that is and it’s something a lot of us are going to lose. … There are so many people who go, “It’s too late to change myself” or “it’s too late to figure out who I am.” “I can’t figure out how to listen to myself any more because there’s so much noise in this world.” She’s somebody who is there because of the time and place in her life, but I loved being able to empower everybody to explore that within themselves.
I grew up camping and was very much in the wilderness when I was a kid, and there’s a part of me when I was thinking about Penelope the first time was like, “Dammit, I wish I had had the balls to do that.” There’s something there that was very wish-fulfillment-y. When you’re camping, when you’re building a fire, when you’re physically in nature and figuring out how to give yourself food or shelter, there’s something that happens that I don’t think a lot of us are aware of, that feels like we’re tapping into our hunter-gatherer roots that are not that far away from us. It’s this inherent primalness that’s in every human being, and when you slow down and are in tune with that, there’s something magical. If there’s any form of religion I believe in it’s that, this unifying nature of our own survival and our own connectedness with nature. So seeing that through a 16-year-old girl? I loved all of it.
Penelope is streaming on Netflix now.
This article appears in September 27 • 2024.