The series follows a group of teenage 7th graders, including best friends Nick Birch and Andrew Glouberman, as they navigate their way through puberty with struggles like masturbation and sexual arousal all in the Westchester County suburbs of New York. The fourth season was released on December 4, 2020, and the fifth season was released on November 5, 2021. In July 2019, Netflix renewed the series through to a sixth season. The third season was preceded by a Valentine's Day special episode on February 8, 2019, and the rest of the third season was released on October 4, 2019. The first season, consisting of ten episodes, premiered on Netflix on September 29, 2017, and the second season was released on October 5, 2018. Big Mouth explores puberty while "embrac a frankness about the human body and sex." The series centers on teens based on Kroll and Goldberg's upbringing in suburban New York, with Kroll voicing his fictional younger self. And hopefully, it will remain a warm reminder that life, for everyone, is as surreal as a fantastical cartoon about horny 13-year-olds.Big Mouth is an American adult animated coming-of-age sitcom created by Andrew Goldberg, Nick Kroll, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett for Netflix. Kroll didn’t let Nick and the gang act on every horny whim without a realistic dose of shame after season 1, and season 2 leaves questions that the next 10 episodes will most likely tackle with the humor and wisdom that makes Big Mouth so good. Now 20 episodes strong, Big Mouth has proven that it is paying attention to its strengths and weaknesses. Big Mouth has not yet been renewed for season 3, but with the acclaim both seasons have received, it’s safe to say a third season is likely. While these loose ends somewhat unravel the satisfaction of such a purposeful second season, I’ll argue that the writers know what they’re doing. Nick’s pubescent fate still remains unclear, and the Shame Wizard returns in the final episode after his “defeat” as a humanized character with personal issues of his own. Depression, of course, affects more than just middle schoolers with raging hormones, and Big Mouth once again grounds its characters in typical scenarios like puberty, drama at school, and divorce, while reminding its viewers that other people out there understand those intangible but widely felt experiences (as Andrew says in episode 10 when he and Nick hunt for Jessi in the Depression Ward inside the Department of Puberty, “Oh my god, there are a billion rooms in here!”).Įven with its piercing wit, Big Mouth still has moments in which it struggles to find solid ground in season 2. Even episode 5, the well-intentioned yet stagnant pro-Planned Parenthood variety show, which reveals how Nick, Andrew, and Jessi’s respective parents coupled up, moves Jessi’s storyline along: she sinks deeper into her belief that she’s to blame for her parents’ split, and soon enough, she trades in her loyal Hormone Monstress for the manipulative Depression Kitty. Nearly all of Big Mouth’s main characters are multi-dimensional in all ways except their animation, but season 2 reveals Jessi to be possibly the most substantive. In episode 3, when the Shame Wizard plays judge and jury and tries Andrew after he is caught masturbating in front of Nick’s sister’s swimsuit, every Shame Wizard in the room morphs into Andrew himself, chanting “Guilty!” at him as he sends himself into an internal tailspin. The Shame Wizard is a more insidious figure than the Hormone Monsters, slipping between real life and the inside of the kids’ heads. And Big Mouth season 2 (now streaming) delivers on exactly that: Enter the Shame Wizard, an emaciated, floating, Voldemort-adjacent creature voiced by Harry Potter’s own David Thewlis. It’s clear Kroll and his team know that when hurricanes of puberty ravage impressionable children, serious self-loathing usually comes next. Animated characters often have moments when they seem too mature for the reality of the situation, usually for the sake of a joke, but the Big Mouth world clearly has consequences that shows like Family Guy and South Park ignore (like in season 1 when Jessi’s mom’s casual dig at her husband, “You’re a lemon, Greg,” turns into a long-term divorce storyline a few episodes later). But because the Hormone Monsters are separate from the kids, rather than, say, an Inside Out sort of deal, the main cast-Nick (Kroll), Andrew (John Mulaney), Jessi (Jessi Klein), Missy (Jenny Slate), and Jay (Jason Mantzoukas)-gets off too easy in season 1.