Mating Season
Directed by Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett
Nick Kroll, Maya Rudolph, Jason Mantzoukas, Aidy Bryant
“The Big Mouth creative team has decided to do Big Mouth again, but with anthropomorphic animals dealing with relationship politics instead of puberty. It is exactly as funny and exactly as exhausting as that sounds.”
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The Review
Mating Season is the new adult animated sitcom from the creative team behind Big Mouth and Human Resources. The premise is that anthropomorphic animals navigate sex, relationships, polyamory, and various adult complications in a world that mostly resembles ours except everyone is a fox or a hyena or in one specific subplot a beaver. The voice cast is stacked. The episode count is ten. The vibe is precisely calibrated.
The show is sharper when it stays specific. An episode built around a wolf couple navigating long distance commitment is the best half hour the team has produced since season three of Big Mouth. An episode where the joke is essentially that birds also have hookup apps wears out before the cold open finishes. The hit-to-miss ratio is roughly two to one, which is competitive for adult animation but not the murderer's row of episodic comedy the creators have produced before.
Maya Rudolph remains comedy's most versatile voice performer, which is true so consistently it feels like a load bearing fact about the entire medium. Jason Mantzoukas does Jason Mantzoukas. Aidy Bryant is doing the most interesting work in the cast and could probably carry her own show out of this. Whether you stick with it depends on how much you enjoyed Big Mouth and how willing you are to watch a show that, in its weaker moments, feels like a brainstorm meeting that ran long.
What It Nails
- +Maya Rudolph's vocal work is best in class in the medium
- +When episodes commit to specific relationship dynamics, the comedy is razor sharp
- +Animation style is more polished than Big Mouth ever was
- +Aidy Bryant is doing some of her best work in any format
What It Botches
- -Premise relies on the audience being willing to laugh at the existence of bird hookup apps
- -Episodes are inconsistent in quality across the ten episode season
- -Some jokes that work in Big Mouth read as tired when ported to a new universe
- -Recurring characters take three episodes too long to develop personalities
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Who It's For
Big Mouth fans. Adult animation completists. People who want a comedy that takes the conversation about relationships seriously while still being silly about animals.
Who Should Skip
Anyone who bounced off Big Mouth. Viewers who do not want to think about beavers in any romantic context. Anyone needing serialized storytelling.
Marketing Roast
Netflix is selling this as the next phase of the Big Mouth creative universe, which is accurate and also exactly what makes the show feel familiar rather than new. The marketing has been restrained, which suggests the platform itself is not entirely sure what it has.
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