Mating Season Review: Netflix's Big Mouth Successor Goes Wild
SkimNews Take
Netflix's reliance on established creators for "Mating Season" suggests a strategy to mitigate risk and leverage familiar comedic sensibilities during a period of leadership transition and market volatility.
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- Mating Season debuted on Netflix as a 10-episode animated comedy co-created by Nick Kroll and described as the "spiritual successor" to Big Mouth.
- Josh, a bear voiced by Zach Woods, learns his girlfriend has left him for an alpha male bear at the start of mating season, launching an arc about post-breakup sexual fumbling.
- Kroll's raccoon character embodies the "everyone else is having better sex" anxiety of singledom, serving as both comic relief and narrative foil to Josh's insecurity.
- The show leans heavily into biologically accurate animal behavior, devoting a full episode to the canine "copulatory tie" and featuring hippos spraying mates with faeces.
- The series deliberately juxtaposes its Disney-esque animal characters — evoking Bambi, Baloo, and Meeko — with graphic sexual content, including a scene parodying the 1941 Disney short 'The Little Whirlwind' where a character floats toward an animal's anus.
- The reviewer concludes the show carries Big Mouth's DNA of offensive humor masking genuine heart, but argues the biologically faithful animal setting creates slightly more audience distance than the original ever managed.
Why it matters: Kroll is betting that the Big Mouth formula — juvenile gross-outs wrapped around real emotional substance — can be transplanted into a new fictional universe. If the show matures the way Big Mouth did over eight seasons, Netflix has a long-tail franchise; if the animal-behavior fixation alienates the hormonally-confused-teen demo that powered the original, the show risks being a curiosity rather than a successor.
