{"id":606726,"date":"2026-05-27T14:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T14:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/606726\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T14:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T14:22:08","slug":"kinky-hippos-foul-mouthed-raccoons-and-heaps-of-heart-big-mouths-creators-wild-new-animated-comedy-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/606726\/","title":{"rendered":"Kinky hippos, foul-mouthed raccoons and heaps of heart: Big Mouth\u2019s creators\u2019 wild new animated comedy | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first minute of Netflix\u2019s animated comedy Mating Season, a bear wakes up, urinates uncontrollably across his cave, stumbles outside, sees two horny raccoons banging away, then spirals into a deep well of shame about it. At this stage, it is barely worth pointing out that Mating Season is the spiritual successor to the outrageous, witty comedy Big Mouth<\/a>, so completely does it inhabit that show\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n

And at this point, you will already know if the show is for you or not. Because Big Mouth, as popular as it was, polarised audiences like little else. That show was about the horrors of puberty and sexual awakening, and it was tailored with absolute precision to its target audience of hormone-battered adolescent boys. You could argue that it did this a little too precisely, because its juvenilia was so relentlessly nuclear-powered that plenty of people found themselves turned off by all the sex and farts and swearing.<\/p>\n

Quite honestly, it was their loss. Once you managed to peel back all the layers of overt offensiveness, Big Mouth might just have qualified as one of the sweetest shows on television. Adolescent boys are a confusing mix of full confidence and extreme awkwardness, and Big Mouth captured both in equal measure. If you\u2019re a certain type of male of a certain type of age, it was a given that you\u2019d see yourself in one of the characters.<\/p>\n

Playing the field \u2026 (from far left) Cassie (Ashly Burch), Alan (Jason Alexander), Fawn (June Diane Raphael) and as Charles (David Duchovny) in Mating Season. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a little harder to achieve with Mating Season, though, because here all the characters are animals, and sex isn\u2019t so much recreational as key to survival. Josh, the aforementioned urinating bear (voiced by Zach Woods), has realised that it is literally mating season. After hibernating for too long, he is dismayed to learn that his girlfriend has run off with a hulking great alpha bear. As such, he ends up forlornly unable to choose whether to \u2013 as he says \u2013 \u201cdevote myself to masturbation,\u201d or to get back on the horse. Which in terms of this show is barely even a metaphor.<\/p>\n

On the surface, this is a story about the newly dumped. Across its 10 episodes, Mating Season follows Josh as he variously hits the apps, engages in spiritually unfulfilling sexual experimentation and comes to a vague sense of equilibrium. But, like Big Mouth, the spine of the show is basically just a placeholder for lots of other weirdness.<\/p>\n

Much of this is perpetuated by co-creator Nick Kroll\u2019s character, an extremely confident raccoon. The character gives Kroll plenty of opportunities to do what he does best, which is to shout disgusting things as loudly as he can, but it also serves a necessary function. The worst part of being young and single is the assumption that everyone else is having the sex of their lives, and Kroll\u2019s raccoon is living proof of that.<\/p>\n

However, once again, all the characters are biologically accurate animals \u2013 governed by an entirely different set of impulses to humans. And this means there\u2019s a little more disconnect between the characters and the audience than the creators probably expected.<\/p>\n

There is, for example, an entire episode about the copulatory tie (the moment when a male canine\u2019s bulbus glandis swells, while the female\u2019s vaginal muscles contract around it, locking them together), while much is also made of the hippopotamus\u2019s ritual of spraying their mate with faeces. No kink-shaming, obviously, but the show is so tied to animal behaviour \u2013 \u201cExpress your anal glands all across my goddamn pelt!\u201d screams Kroll\u2019s character in the middle of copulation \u2013 that it becomes less a relatable story of sexual development and more a study in \u2018hey, aren\u2019t animals gross?\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s weird when you see these Disneyfied characters start rutting with abandon.\u2019 Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n

Another thing that Mating Season does \u2013 and I\u2019m going to let you decide whether this is a good thing or not \u2013 is exploit the Disneyfication of its characters. Bears and deer and raccoons were all well-worn character types in the classic hand-drawn Disney movies of the last century. When you see them, you can\u2019t help but think of Bambi or Baloo the bear, or Meeko from Pocahontas, so it\u2019s weird when they all start rutting with abandon.<\/p>\n

To make it even more explicit, the 1941 Disney short The Little Whirlwind features a scene where Mickey Mouse becomes so entranced by the smell of a freshly baked cake that the scent physically picks him up and floats him towards it. There is a variation of that trope here, only the character ends up floating towards an animal\u2019s anus, muttering \u201cNummy nummy nummy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, once you get over this, we\u2019re left with another truly disgusting sex comedy that has much more heart than anyone will ever give it credit for. If it sticks around and matures, like Big Mouth did, we might have something special on our hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the first minute of Netflix\u2019s animated comedy Mating Season, a bear wakes up, urinates uncontrollably across his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-606726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}