Review: Never mind the joke title, 'PEN15' may be the year's best new show

There are some long arcs through the season, involving their various crushes, the inevitable tribe of popular girls and the marriage of Anna's parents, which is troubled; one feels the accrued weight of the series in the season's end. An unsmoked cigarette makes its way through the episodes. Even so, more than many shows today, it is episodic, running on classic sitcom tropes — the lie that brings trouble, the backfiring good deed — with an idea developed and done within half an hour. Despite the pre-adolescent air of crisis that prevails over matters small and large, most things are the same at the beginning of one episode as at the end of the last.