An early episode of the fourth season of “Big Mouth,” now streaming on Netflix, opens with the show’s protagonists, Andrew Glouberman and Nick Birch, embarking on their first day of eighth grade. “Look at us, growing up,” Nick (voiced by Nick Kroll) says. “Not like Bart Simpson. That yellow schmuck has been in fourth grade for, like, thirty years.” A clever but heartfelt cartoon that is bursting with pop-cultural references and is popular with adult viewers, “Big Mouth” owes more than a little to “The Simpsons.” (Even the use of “schmuck” is evocative of Krusty the Clown.) Still, Nick’s comment identifies the uniqueness of this series, created by Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett. By allowing its characters to age—and by focussing in on them, to an almost painful degree, as they do so—“Big Mouth” can feel more akin to live-action TV than it does to cartoons such as “South Park” and “Bob’s Burgers,” which have used animation to keep their protagonists static over the course of many seasons, as if preserved in amber.
“I’m going through changes,” Charles Bradley sings in the show’s opening theme. (The tune was originated by Black Sabbath, that band of hormonal lads from Birmingham.) Since 2017, when the first season aired, “Big Mouth” has depicted the riotous, often alarming transformations that puberty wreaks on the young. The characters, who, back then, were seventh graders, encountered new growths and protrusions (hard-ons, pubic hair, boobs), distressing secretions (sweat, semen, blood), and the nutso psychological effects these bodily changes incur. One of the show’s strong suits is its portrayal of the capricious ways in which youthful sexuality can express itself: Jay (Jason Mantzoukas), a greasy but sympathetic classmate of Andrew and Nick’s, discovers that he is bisexual by humping a “boy” pillow as well as a “girl” pillow; Andrew (John Mulaney), a bespectacled, mustachioed ball of neuroses, develops a crush on his cousin and, although he is ashamed, proceeds to send her a dick pic; the lovable, bucktoothed nerd Missy (Jenny Slate) masturbates with her childhood Glo Worm and refers to the act as her “worm dance.”
The show’s anarchic spirit is reflected in its graphic, borderline grotesque style of animation, which enables it to depict aspects of pubescent sexuality that might otherwise offend or disturb. (Goldberg was a longtime writer on “Family Guy,” an adult cartoon that is like “Big Mouth” ’s coarse, alcoholic uncle.) The kids’ urges and fears are represented by a slew of fantastical creatures: there are shaggy, wisecracking “hormone monsters”; a finger-wagging “shame wizard”; a silken-voiced “depression kitty”; and, as of this season, a jumpy “anxiety mosquito” named Tito (Maria Bamford). Unsurprisingly, Tito is a real bummer. “Their penises are thick hairy hogs and yours is a bald little piglet,” he tells Nick, a late bloomer, as the boy is getting ready to take a shower at summer camp.
The first three episodes of the fourth season, which take place at the camp, are some of the funniest TV I’ve watched in a while. There’s a new character named Milk (Emily Altman), a mouth-breathing whiner who can’t stop bringing up obscure factoids, seemingly apropos of nothing (“My dad’s friend Bob Reedy says there’s no such thing as choice, only destiny”). He is a familiar prototype: the uppity dork who is so annoying that even the softer-hearted kids don’t feel sorry for him. “Milk, your dick is so weird. I can see the veins in your balls,” a bunkmate tells him. “During the Renaissance, scrota such as mine were considered a delicacy,” Milk responds airily. Perhaps nothing embodies the “Big Mouth” formula better than this exchange: gross, hilarious, weird, precise.
A TV show can have growing pains, too. Andrew and Nick are the alter egos of Goldberg and Kroll, who’ve been real-life best friends since childhood, and, early on, the series hewed closely to their adolescent milieu: upper-middle-class, white, straight Jews from Westchester. (In Season 1, the “Great Women”-themed bat mitzvah of Nick and Andrew’s sardonic friend Jessi—voiced by Jessi Klein—has an Anne Frank table.) Season by season, “Big Mouth” has had to figure out, in tandem with the roiling cultural and political realities of the past few years, how to develop and fine-tune its world alongside its characters.
In Season 2, a gay classmate, Matthew (Andrew Rannells), and a Latina one, Gina (Gina Rodriguez), got more airtime; in Season 3, a new student named Ali (Ali Wong) introduced herself as pansexual. “If you’re bisexual, you like tacos and burritos,” she said. “But I’m saying I like tacos and burritos, and I could be into a taco that was born a burrito, or a burrito that is transitioning into a taco.” This flippant distinction, which seemingly suggested that bisexuals could not be attracted to transgender and nonbinary people, led to an outcry online. (Goldberg apologized on Twitter.) This summer, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, Jenny Slate, who is white and Jewish, announced that she would no longer voice Missy, a character with a Black father and a white, Jewish mother, because “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” Slate had already recorded Missy’s dialogue for Season 4, but she would be replaced by the Black comedian Ayo Edebiri, beginning with the penultimate episode.
Part of the charm as well as the significance of “Big Mouth,” I had always felt, was its commitment to the confusion of categories, born of a sense that identity, sexual and otherwise, can be a messy thing that does not necessarily adhere to a clear orthodoxy. (In this regard, the show is similar to others I loved this year: crude, funny, yet searching comedies like FXX’s “Dave” and Hulu’s “PEN15,” which explore race and sexuality in unexpected ways.) As I watched Season 4, I was relieved to see “Big Mouth” double down on that idea. One of my favorite gags was Andrew’s obsession with Jessi’s new boyfriend, Michaelangelo. Andrew, who is straight, swoons over the dreamy Brit, but this is treated as unremarkable; it is just one more facet of Andrew’s horniness. A more serious arc deals with Natalie, a trans camper. Jessi is upset when Natalie starts bunking with the girls—not because Jessi is transphobic but because last summer Natalie, who had not yet transitioned and was still known as Gabe, from the boys’ cabin, teased Jessi mercilessly, calling her “fire crotch.”
The show also confronts questions that were raised by Slate’s statement—Who should be able to give voice to Black characters? What would it look like to represent a biracial character fully?—by turning them into plot points. This season, Missy, who has grown up in a “post-racial household,” grapples with both her burgeoning womanhood and her evolving racial identity. “N-word alert!” she blurts out nervously, when visiting her older, cooler cousins, Quinta and Lena (Quinta Brunson and Lena Waithe). The cousins, who tell Missy that her parents haven’t let her be Black, take her to get her hair braided (“What shampoo do you use?” “Well, Tom’s of Maine, of course!”) and encourage her to buy new clothes, which she does—but only after bidding a weepy farewell to the overalls she has worn for the past three seasons. “Talking to your clothes? That’s some white-girl shit right there,” Quinta says. “Girl, please, you did the exact same thing with your blanket,” Lena retorts, reminding us that categories, though useful as shorthand, can be tricky.
When Missy’s mother expresses doubts about whether her daughter’s cornrows are “manageable,” Missy blows up. “Stop stealing our men!” she yells, in a hilarious, shocking moment that turns heartrending when she gasps, through tears, “I just really wanted to show you my new hair.” Later, in a Halloween-themed episode, Missy reaches a détente with her fragmented self and kisses her refracted reflections in a haunted house’s broken mirror—a sweet reimagining of a sequence from Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In this moment, her voice changes from Slate’s to Edebiri’s. “There I am,” she says, triumphantly. “I’m all of these Missys.” ♦
