I didn't have a lot of interest in this offering from Netflix, but enough people online said enough good things about it for me to check out. And I liked it! It's an animated show about puberty. Yep, let that sink in. It's nothing obscenely clever and feels a lot like if Family Guy had Nick Kroll and Jason Mantzoukas and Jenny Slate. That's a start, sure, but what makes Big Mouth actually work is that it's unlike anything else I've ever seen. On the surface it's just a show about a bunch of tweens dealing with their weird-ass gross bodies and hormones. (Who wants to see that? No one wants to see that. Ugh. And yet!) But really, of course, it's a show about tweens going through puberty, made by and for adults like you and me. Jason Mantzoukas said in a podcast that it was like "the Geeks part of Freaks and Geeks," which is a great way to think of it. It's also, notably, about girl tweens almost as much as it's about boy tweens; male puberty has been done to death in pop culture by now, but how many shows and movies out there are cracking jokes about first periods and girls having desires of their own? I mean you've got Tina Belcher, I guess, being perpetually horny in her own specific and weird way, but this is like that on steroids, with one of the young women even "meeting her vagina" for the first time in a very literal sense. (The vagina is voiced by a bubbly Kristen Wiig.) If all of this sounds just too weird for you, and like borderline child pornography, hey - I get it! But it's really not that, at all. It's about what a weird time middle school is - something we can all relate to, even if it makes us cringe!
Ten episodes, half an hour each. Give it a go. The first episode has a bit where a bunch of anthropomorphic dicks are dunking basketballs. You'll know probably right then and there if this is for you or not.
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