Netflix’s Big Mouth – Season 1 REVIEW

Ever since The Simpsons kicked off the golden age of adult animated comedy, we’ve been seeing more and more pushes against the boundaries of what’s acceptable on-screen. Perhaps the most obvious examples are The Simpsons’ most popular bastard children, South Park and Family Guy, which – despite the creators’ many, many differences – both thrive on content that’s edgy for the sake of edgy. Both generally have the f-bomb bleeped, but still, there’s almost no subject that’s off-limits for them (the one notable exception is when Comedy Central censored South Park’s depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, blurring-out be upon him).

These opened the door for an endless stream of ever-more-vulgar and puerile animated comedy, most of which bore huge, greasy fingerprints from its predecessors – as an example, you could never have had the dysfunctional central family unit of Rick and Morty without Family Guy and American Dad, both of which were drawing so heavily from The Simpsons they might as well have been traced. Even The Simpsons itself was controversial, once upon a time, with former President George H. W. Bush encouraging people to be ‘more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons’ – it was never ‘adult’ in the same way as its successors, but it wasn’t wholly PG-rated either, finding an ideal biting point of being outwardly family-friendly while slipping in some very mucky jokes indeed. (Remember ‘Sneed’s Feed and Seed – formerly Chuck’s’? Think about it…)

Anyway, Netflix’s new offering Big Mouth follows in this fine tradition, breaching one of the final taboos (outside of Japan) by featuring its protagonists, four just-pubescent children, in some fairly sexual situations. Something which the show itself admits sounds skeevy in the series finale. Previous shows have had their moments, with the South Park boys occasionally getting naked, Family Guy’s Herbert the pervert and his one joke, and The Simpsons Movie showing Bart’s penis. The difference, though, is that rather than being a throwaway gag like those examples, in Big Mouth it’s front and centre as a topic – in a curious parallel, the first episode features Andrew getting a glimpse of Nick’s penis, then subsequently becoming worried about his own girth and hairiness as men and boys have since time immemorial.

It’s still played for comedy, of course. And this is the neat sidestep around any legal or ethical quibbles the viewer might have, that it’s all obviously done for the purposes of comedy rather than the purposes of titillation. There’s also the fact that if you’re going to make light of puberty – and make no mistake, that’s the central pillar of the show, and is very fertile ground for laughs – then it would be flatly dishonest not to also deal with sexuality. Within a rounding error, everyone who’s been through puberty knows good and goddamn well how horny they were, and if they don’t then they’re lying.

And it is this immediate accessibility to basically anyone that makes it so robust as comedy material, and so obvious as a concept – the only reason nobody’s done it properly before likely being the hand-wringing about ‘taste’ and ‘decency’, arguments which would be far better used against whatever Seth McFarlane’s doing now. Whereas a lot of the adult animated canon is more wont to feature far-out, crazy situations involving magic and robots, Big Mouth stays largely grounded in suburban family reality. There’s the occasional flight of fancy but nothing major, no plot-warping conceit of ‘this week they’re all going to Zimbabwe’ or some such.

The most obvious of these fanciful bits is the vaguely Dr. Seussian Hormone Monster, giving voice to every impulse surging through a teen boy’s mind (typically to masturbate) – an unrestrained psychological id in the vein of Eric Cartman or Rick Sanchez before him, characterisation that actually makes a lot more sense coming from a figment of someone’s imagination than it does an actual person. The Hormone Monster is typically the one to inject profanity or a smutty joke into a situation, but unlike a lot of examples of his sort of character, is rarely the one to drive the narrative – instead viewed, quite rightly, as a terrifying natural force that must be restrained.

The Hormone Monster doesn’t just go around telling people to have a wank, though – he also functions as a kind of mentor. A crude, dysfunctional and self-serving mentor, but a mentor all the same, there to stick by the characters in times of crisis and offer vulgar words of advice. It might be for gender-related reasons, but this aspect seems more pronounced in the Hormone Monstress – that’s, the girls get in on all the same fun. As one of the episode titles reminds us, ‘Girls are horny too’.

That episode features probably the absolute most graphic the show gets, with Jessi, the central gang’s token girl, getting out a hand mirror and finally taking a proper look at what’s going on down there. Which we as viewers also see, but it’s hard to say just how explicit a vagina is when it has a little cartoon face and is chatting away merrily about coming of age.

In fact, most of the more fanciful moments are along the same lines as the various Hormone Monsters and Jessi’s genitals – abstract concepts or inanimate objects given voice and personality (and a couple of ghosts thrown in).

But what of the actual human characters? Nick and Andrew make a pretty convincing buddy-duo, albeit that like most child characters how childish they are can fluctuate wildly. Rounding out the main ensemble are Jessi – who, as a girl, is forced to play the voice of reason more often than she’d like – and budding magician Jay, just bright enough to realise how overshadowed he is by his awful father and awful older brothers. There’s also a very strong secondary character/potential fifth ranger in the charmingly hapless geek Missy, object of Nick’s confused young desire, who comes off eerily like a version of Dora the Explorer who peaked far, far too soon.

A lot of the fun comes from this main group bumping up against their respective parents – all of whom have neuroses big enough to be seen from space. Andrew’s eerily saccharine parents probably provide the most yuks, utterly placid even in the face of Andrew’s older siblings having serious problems of their own. However, it’s a close-run thing between them and Jay’s dad, firmly established as a presence long before we actually meet him in the flesh in the final episode. A divorce lawyer by trade, this provides a fairly strong running joke in which, whenever somebody says something particularly awful, it is identified as a line from an advert for his law firm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-E449cd_Ek

The series covers the various beats of the early adolescent experience fairly neatly. As a sampler, we have first kisses, first awkward fumbles, first being told ‘I only like you as a friend’, first questioning of sexual orientation, first getting well and truly drunk – and lest we forget, near-constant masturbation. Into pillows, over well-developed-looking vegetables, to that one porn film Sylvester Stallone made, you name it. There’s also the weightier subject matter of one of the gang’s parents having a same-sex affair and plunging their marriage into difficulties – which feels a little well-trodden as material, but the show doesn’t get bogged down in it, it keeps the jokes coming instead of grinding to a halt. Even though this isn’t by definition part of the puberty experience, it slots right into the pervasive ‘loss of innocence’ process.

More than any question of innocence though, the real thread that runs through the whole show is – despite all the monsters and ghosts – intimacy, and specifically that special kind of cringe-comedy intimacy that hit its peak in David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s Peep Show. This goes back to the idea of puberty being a universal experience, something we can all in a serious and direct way relate to. And sure, maybe you personally didn’t prematurely ejaculate while slow-dancing, or get your period in dangerously clashing white trousers – but my god, what if you had? Obviously it’s physically painful to think about, but the point is you are thinking about it.

I’ve chosen to review the series as a whole because that’s clearly how it was meant to be consumed – it refers to its Netflixy origins several times in mild fourth-wall breaks, even going so far as to assume it is being binge-watched. And this perhaps explains the show running out of steam a little in the final episode, in which Nick discovers internet porn (despite having googled ‘gay porn’ episodes earlier, when he got a little confused over the new The Rock movie) and is sucked into the pornscape, which could have been glorious and terrifying in the hands of the right animator, yet is presented as a by-the-numbers Apocalypse Now homage.

And its being based on the internet is perhaps a clue to its pushing of one of very few remaining boundaries in broadcasting. The most offensive and graphic stuff mainstream animation has ever been able to offer is, frankly, tame compared to a lot of stuff out there on the internet. The grotesqueries of programs like Mr Pickles – a show where every fibre of its being was desperately trying to offend – simply can’t hold a candle to the kind of thing fetish fan artists churn out in half an hour. So it’s perhaps best that Big Mouth didn’t try to compete on those grounds, and maintained a bit of an emotional core under all the sex jokes.

Throughout this review, I’ve been tossing about the phrase ‘adult animated comedy’ to refer to stuff like South Park, when really, what we call ‘adult’ simply isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination. What it is, is adolescent, and Big Mouth is no exception. However, since it’s a show about adolescence, that can’t help but come off as a compliment. And if you’re a fan of that sort of smutty, vulgar, ‘ooh-er, sounds a bit rude’ comedy there’s a lot to love here.