CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Penelope: Eat berries, hug trees and take your iPhone... The Gen Z guide to survival

Daily Mail​

24-04-2025

Penelope (Sky Atlantic)
Let's save you some trouble. If you can't imagine yourself being profoundly moved by a teenage girl weepily hugging a giant redwood tree in a forest, you're not going to like Penelope much.
Just say to yourself, 'That doesn't sound my kind of thing,' and turn the page to read the Garfield cartoon. I won't hold it against you.
Truth is, Penelope isn't my kind of thing either. I had hopes for it during the first few minutes, when it promised to be an Alice In Wonderland for the digital age. That was rather too optimistic.
Set in the backwoods of America's Pacific coast, this is a largely wordless fantasy about a girl, more child than adolescent, who glimpses a timber wolf, during a back-to-nature break with family and friends.
Inspired to explore the wilderness, she follows a rabbit and runs away. When she stumbles on a railway track, she leaps aboard a goods train and rides until nightfall in an empty carriage.
Next day, she finds herself in a town with a cafe where she skims through a book on how to survive by sleeping on moss and eating berries.
A mumbly folk singer befriends her, letting her spend the night in his camper van while he snores chastely beside her.
And then she's off into the great unspoilt expanses, where there are more towering redwoods than anyone can hug in a lifetime.
You might be unsurprised to learn that each episode in this eight-part series ends with an earnest avowal of thanks to the Duwamish and Stillaguamish tribes, who 'have inhabited these lands and waters since time immemorial'.
Penelope is resourceful, easily able to give adults the slip.
She's also improbably athletic, able to jump onto a moving train and scoop up all her camping equipment without dislocating her arms (or, like the Welsh poet W.H. Davies, who travelled America this way, slipping and losing a foot).
Whether it's a good idea to encourage Generation Z to ride the railways for free is open to debate.
Most of them barely leave their bedrooms, so I don't suppose much harm can come of it.
Apple products featured so heavily that I began to suspect the production was sponsored, though there was no hint of that in the credits.
Numerous close-ups showed Penelope (Megan Stott) typing her thoughts into the messaging app and then deleting them ('Mom . . . was I a happy kid?').
We saw her swiping into the settings menu to switch off 'location sharing' so that her parents couldn't track her.
Then she went shopping for outdoor gear at a camping superstore and, when the slow-witted youth on the till refused to accept payment by Apple Pay, she used her phone to instantly purchase and download a $500 giftcard — triumphantly telling the whole shop how she'd done it.
What a handy survival tip . . . although it might be more useful if only her phone had a built-in pepper spray in case of bear attacks.