Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Penelope’ On Netflix, About A Teenage Girl Who Leaves Her Family To Find Herself In The Forests Of The Pacific Northwest

Every teenager everywhere has dreamed of simply walking away from home and being on their own, just to see if they can do it. It’s essentially a rush to be grown up, or answering some sort of calling that they can’t follow with schoolwork to do and parents governing their time. A new series imagines what happens when a teenage girl follows her calling one day.

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Opening Shot: We see a group of teenagers all wearing headphones during a silent dance party in the woods.

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The Gist: One of the teens, Penelope (Megan Stott) takes off her headphones when she sees what looks like a wolf near the trees. But then she looks again and it’s not there.

The next morning, she wakes in the cabin her family is sharing with with other families from her class. She goes outside and sees a bunny, then realizes she’s being drawn in by the beauty she sees as the sun rises. She decides to keep walking, eventually texting her inquiring mom that she’s going on a morning nature hike. Her mom wants the 16-year-old to come back for SAT prep, even though it’s Sunday.

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But Penelope keeps walking. She goes to a Target-like store, finds the camping aisle and snaps up whatever she thinks she might need. When she realizes the cashiers don’t take Apple Pay — she only has her phone, not her wallet — she buys a gift card on her phone and uses that. She packs her new backpack on the loading dock, with the assistance of YouTube videos.

She continues to walk, ignoring more panicked texts from her mother and turning off the “find my phone” function. She hops on a passing freight train, not exactly knowing where it’s going. That’s when she leaves a voice text for her parents, telling them she’s not running away, but more running towards something. “I’ve been called,” she says. “I need this.”

When she’s kicked off the train at a station, she goes into a cafe with free books to read, where she happens to find a book on surviving in the woods. There she meets a musician named Sam (Austin Abrams), who invites her to sleep in his van that night (no funny business, though) and talks about why he’s out on the road making music instead of doing it at home and putting it on YouTube. He equates it to the difference between seeing a picture of a river and actually being in that river.

He drives her to Cascades National Park, where she inquires about camping. When she realizes she doesn’t have the money for a park passport, she sneaks in and finds a spot to sleep for the night.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Penelope is a teenage version of Wild and a female, teenage version of Into The Wild .

Our Take: Written by Mark Duplass and Mel Eslyn and directed by Eslyn (the series was financed by Duplass Brothers Productions so it’s not considered a Netflix original), Penelope gave us two very distinct feelings. On the purely artistic side, we were excited to see just how Penelope, who had no experience camping on her own and no survival skills, manages to be by herself in the forest without being eaten or starving or freezing to death. And we enjoyed Stott’s mostly-solo performance in the show’s first two episodes.

But, as a parent of a tween, we kept thinking about Penelope’s panicked parents, wondering where their daughter is, and becoming even more panicked when they get this cryptic message from her that tells them not to come find her. And as a person who is not a camper at heart, I wondered why we’re not seeing scenes of Penelope trying to figure out where to go to the bathroom, running from bears, getting cut by a wayward branch or itching from poison ivy.

On a certain level, we know that the story behind Penelope has a bit of a fantasy element to it; we’re supposed to believe that this girl can survive in the woods on her own, with no one coming after her, with skills that she learned in a book she happened to find right before going deep into the forest. But there comes a point where we need to see Penelope face at least a little bit of discomfort or danger.

Because we don’t get much context about Penelope’s life before she wanders into the woods, we’re not sure exactly what made her feel like she didn’t belong. Perhaps there’s a reason for that; instead of concentrating on the whys, we’re being told to concentrate on the journey she takes and what she learns about herself along the way. In that regard, Penelope is a pleasant, almost warm-and-fuzzy, watch. But we also can’t help but ask all of those questions and more as we see her on that journey.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Penelope hugs a huge tree in the Cascades forest, and we hear a heartbeat on the soundtrack.

Sleeper Star: Nathan M. Miller is the cinematographer for the series, and he makes the forest look lush and inviting, not isolating and dangerous.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Penelope asks the cashier if they have Apple Pay, he shrugs and asks the cashier next to him, who also shrugs. That store needs to retrain everyone to let them know how customers can pay for their stuff.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We enjoyed Penelope because Megan Stott’s performance is a clinic in solo acting, and we appreciate the story’s fantasy aspects. But those nagging questions that pop into our heads while watching it just don’t go away.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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