Mark Duplass' Netflix drama is like a YA “Wild”

Hulu’s adaptation of Small fires everywhere premiered right at the start of the 2020 COVID lockdown, and although it was nominated for several major Emmys that fall, my memory of the miniseries is very hazy. One thing I do know, however, is that when selecting the daughters of Reese Witherspoon's character, the casting team found two young actresses – Jade Pettyjohn and Megan Stott – who looked absolutely uncanny like Reese Witherspoon.

Actually, I had even forgotten this detail before I sat down to watch the new Netflix drama Penelope and Stott are instantly recognizable – especially because if you read what is essentially an eight-part YA version of Wildit makes a lot of sense to choose a real Reese Witherspoon lookalike as the lead actor.

This is probably not just a coincidence. Penelope was created by Mark Duplass, who worked with Witherspoon in The morning showand Mel Eslyn, who began her career as a long-time collaborator of the late, great Lynn Shelton, the lead director of Small fires everywhere.

But even if Duplass and Eslyn weren't intentionally seeking out a teenage Witherspoon, it was a happy accident. Stott's expressive features and ability to balance between crude humor and grounded pathos are at the core of this mostly likable and mostly wholesome wilderness survival story. I'm not entirely sure who the target audience is, but perhaps the show's rollout at the Sundance and SXSW festivals will give away the answer: It's a drama for the indie tween in your life, or possibly your own inner indie tween.

Penelope begins with the 16-year-old protagonist dancing as part of a silent rave party in a remote camping valley—all participants wear fancy headphones and dance in their respective private spaces. The next morning, Penelope heads out. Ignoring her mother's friendly calls of “It's time to go home!”, she heads to a hypermarket in a nearby town, where she finds herself drawn to the outdoor section. As if carried by some spiritual force higher than herself, Penelope fills a bag with basic camping supplies and hops into an unsecured train car that will take her to other locations, leaving only an apologetic note for her parents. She is neither angry nor unhappy, just searching for something she cannot put into words.

Soon, Penelope makes her way to a national park in the Pacific Northwest, and even though she doesn't have a camping permit, she sneaks into the park and begins living off the land.

What motivates Penelope is revealed gradually and doesn't necessarily make sense, but the series alternates between grounded realism and poetic “please don't look for realism” whimsy. All you need to know is that Penelope has lost touch with her life in the modern world, and that in her unaccompanied retreat she is searching for an authentic version of herself. Her survival skills are almost nil, but she is lucky enough to have an aptly titled Wilderness Survival Guide in a bookstore/cafe on their way to the forest, and it contains enough helpful tips to keep Penelope alive until her natural resilience kicks in. And she is very resilient.

Just as Eslyn and Duplass probably didn't cast their lead role at random, her name wasn't chosen at random either. Penelope is on a personal odyssey that sees her encounter a number of people and animals at a rate of exactly one per 30-minute episode. She meets a somewhat pretentious but generally harmless young crooner (Austin Abrams); an intense but generally harmless older environmental activist (Krisha Fairchild); and a trio of odd but generally harmless Catholic teenagers (including one played by The Penguin Rhenzy Feliz outbreak).

These people help Penelope learn general spiritual lessons—you get the message that “modern tech-addicted teenagers have lost touch with Mother Earth and, by extension, with themselves” without anyone having to spell it out—but they also give Penelope someone to talk to. In truth, Stott doesn’t need co-stars. Sometimes the scripts encourage her to mutter to herself, and you can be sure she’s chatting to trees and wild animals almost immediately. But Stott is so emotionally present that every one of her frustrations or joys comes across wordlessly. If there’s any ambiguity, the score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, featuring Julia Piker, reflects her feelings pretty directly.

Two years ago, Netflix broadcast the six-part survival drama Keep breathingwith a strong lead performance by Melissa Barrera. It worked well when it focused on the heroine making fire and finding food and all that fun stuff, but it was heavily over-plotted and refused to simply follow its My side of the mountain/ax Imagination.

Penelope generally has more confidence that Into the wild (which is directly referenced) with a teenage girl is story enough. The episodes where something actually “happens” were by far my least favorite, because the more plot you force on, the more realism the narrative demands, and the more realism the narrative demands, the less it works. Yes, Penelope's experience is meant to be taken literally, but if you force me to think too concretely, my thoughts will go along the lines of “Maybe Penelope shouldn't accept the somewhat questionable hospitality of this strange young man, no matter how harmless he seems,” or “Maybe Penelope shouldn't try to befriend this bear cub,” or “If she spent less than $500 on her supplies, most of what she got is probably pretty poor quality, and besides, why does she suddenly have so many changes of clothes?” Penelope is not so completely without risk that it would encourage most viewers to follow in their footsteps, but it deals with the concrete risks of their experience in a sugar-coated way that does not benefit from drawing attention to it.

On the other hand, give me a 28-minute episode where Penelope mostly tries to quietly start a fire, or another where she is involved in an extensive construction project, and I am thoroughly entertained. I am, after all, the type of person who wishes that Lost was just a group of survivors trying to get to a completely normal island without smoke monsters.

Eslyn, who directed all eight chapters, has no qualms about taking viewers through several, almost extended training montages in which we follow Penelope through a series of failures before reveling in her eventual triumphs. She and cinematographer Nathan M. Miller place Penelope in a beautiful green canopy, mixing nature porn with pop-girl power uplifting in a way that quickly creates an emotional connection. The series feels like a slightly too serious, hastily scrawled poem with a doodle of a wildflower in the margin. But in a good way!

The investment that Eslyn and Stott make in Penelope probably peaks a little sooner than it should. The last part or two are rushed and raise more of these questions that are better left unasked than the rest of the series should raise. I don't need another season of Penelopebut one episode more or less would have been ideal.