‘Big Mouth’ Was Courageously Filthy ‘Til the End, but About So Much More Than Sex: TV Review

SPOILER ALERT: The following piece contains spoilers for the series finale of “Big Mouth,” now streaming on Netflix.

It may surprise you to learn that “Big Mouth,” the Netflix animated series chronicling a group of teenagers’ physical and emotional maturation, concludes its eight-season run without one of its protagonists having sex. Then again, one of many lessons “Big Mouth” imparted to its viewership — some well past the travails of puberty, some just on their cusp — is that sex is an expansive idea. With Hormone Monsters, the show’s signature metaphor and comic creation, as their Virgils, the characters of “Big Mouth” have explored everything from oral sex to erotica to enough masturbation to make the entire premise a smirking play on “coming of age” even without more conventional congress. But in the end, all the gleeful obscenity took a backseat to the story’s true subject: the terrifying process of growing up.

“Big Mouth” ultimately aired for nearly a decade, an eternity in the streaming age; in fact, the show wraps its tenure as the longest-running scripted original on Netflix, beating out “Grace and Frankie.” And yet the creative team — comedian Nick Kroll and his childhood friend Andrew Goldberg, working with married duo Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett — avoided the frozen quality that helps so many animated series, whose actors don’t age on-screen, last for the long haul. On “The Simpsons,” Springfield is a timeless bubble. But “Big Mouth” is about the passage of time, and what it does to young bodies. (The theme song, Charles Bradley’s “Changes,” couldn’t be more apt.) Its heroes progress and evolve, graduating middle school and moving along the proverbial bases. This dynamism makes their journey’s end both more natural and more meaningful than its medium’s typical stasis.

Kroll and Goldberg loosely modeled the leads of “Big Mouth,” Nick (Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney), after younger versions of themselves. Hormone Monsters Maury (Kroll, in one of several roles), Rick (Kroll again), Connie (Maya Rudolph) and Mona (Thandiwe Newton) are also drawn from real life, albeit indirectly. These creatures personify the uncontrollable urges and insatiable desires that come with the first stirrings of adolescence — the voice telling you to rub one out in the bathroom or, as Mona’s charge Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Ayo Edebiri) does in Season 8, hump your robotics team’s final project to death. The Hormone Monsters were soon joined by a full menagerie of metaphysical beings, from the Shame Wizard (David Thewlis) to the Depression Kitty (Jean Smart) to the Anxiety Mosquito (Maria Bamford). The interplay between the Monsters and their mentees nonetheless remained the core of the show; “Human Resources,” a spinoff set entirely in the creatures’ workplace, was canceled after two seasons.

The thesis of “Big Mouth” is neatly summarized by a song in its penultimate episode: “There’s no such thing as normal / We’re each and all uniquely strange.” What could be treacly assurance á la “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was instead reinforced with gleeful profanity, like when a Miss Frizzle-esque sex ed teacher voiced by Natasha Lyonne takes the class on a Magic School Bus tour of a penis. Yet the show’s underlying sincerity never wavered. “Big Mouth” was committed to destigmatizing the most shameful and embarrassing parts of getting used to a grown-up body, while still acknowledging the inherent humor. In modeling candor and acceptance, the series was also open to recognizing and correcting its own mistakes. The biracial Missy was originally voiced by Jenny Slate, who makes a cameo in the final season as a kindly pharmacist who explains you can’t get pregnant from clothed dry-humping, before Edebiri took over the role in 2020, a casting change that was written into the show as a sign of Missy’s increasing self-possession.

For their final act of embracing adulthood, the “Big Mouth” kids face their fears and walk into a blank, expanding void that represents the unknowable future. It’s not a subtle way to illustrate the yawning abyss of infinite potential, but “Big Mouth” never bothered with subtlety when lewdly inventive allegory would do. Over eight seasons, the now-15-year-olds have moved from reckoning with their first periods and erections to their initial attempts at healthy, communicative relationships. “Big Mouth” leaves them, and us, with one final lesson: Once you have the confidence to embrace your own messy quirks, you’re equipped to face whatever comes your way — pun somewhat intended.