Rather than indulging a blanket depiction of adolescents as reprobate horndogs-a surefire recipe for an easier, lesser show- Big Mouth dwells in confusion and uncertainty. The new season tackles topics ranging from sex to drugs to sex to divorce to even more sex, but the show takes care to showcase the full, incoherent range of tween desire, fantasy, and insecurity. The show follows an ever-widening circle of students at suburban Bridgeton Middle School as they attempt to navigate the myriad indignities of puberty, along with their well-meaning but endlessly embarrassing parents. In its second season, Big Mouth, unlike junior high, has only gotten better.
Yet by the end of Big Mouth’s 10-episode first season, which I devoured over the course of a few nights, I came away convinced it was one of the very best shows Netflix had ever made, a laugh-out-loud, immensely creative, and unexpectedly compassionate satire of one of the most reliably horrible periods of any human’s life. I respected the considerable talent involved, including comedians Nick Kroll (who co-created the show), John Mulaney, Jessi Klein, Maya Rudolph, Jenny Slate, and Jordan Peele, but feared I was in for paint-by-numbers shock humor and smug envelope pushing.
So when I first began watching Netflix’s Big Mouth, an animated show about pubescent middle schoolers and the “hormone monsters” who stalk them, my expectations were low. Crumb’s famed 1960s comic strip), but it’s a brand of humor that almost always leaves me cold. “Cartoons say the foulest things” has been a crowded corner of American culture at least as far back as Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 X-rated cult hit Fritz the Cat (itself based on R.
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