Season Review: Big Mouth Season Six

Overview:

Andrew, Nick, Jessi, Missy, Jay and the rest of the hormonal misfits get ready for another season of chaaaaanges, only this year it’s more than just their bodies that are transforming. New personal triumphs and a myriad of budding relationships have everyone vulnerable in new ways. However, these teens begin to understand the imperfect, fleeting nature of love when their parents and family structures begin to buckle under new pressures. Validation and friendship have never been more important once the man-made families that the Big Mouth kids have made become their only hopes of surviving the shake-ups at home.

Oh,  Jay gets trapped in the Bread Bowl Realm, an alternate dimension. Standard puberty silliness.

Our Take:

Big Mouth’s hormonal teenagers have faced uphill battles ever since the start of this broad comedy and while it’s safe to say that they’ll likely never fully understand their bodies, they’re at least beginning to tolerate these clumsy meat sacks. The majority of Big Mouth’s characters were 12-going-on-13 during season one and now, five seasons later, it’s almost jarring to have Andrew and Nick at makeout parties and contemplating second base. It’s safe to say that horniness is at an all-time high in season six of Big Mouth, but somehow, so is empathy. This year features payoffs to Big Mouth’s many blossoming relationships as it heads into its most emotionally complex territory yet. Big Mouth season six preaches the mantra that the only way to get love is to give love, but that it’s also essential to love and understand yourself. Andrew’s been “loving himself” since the pilot, but this season that sentiment finds a way to be true without also being gross.

Big Mouth has never exactly struggled when it comes to its writing, but this season develops a strong structure where many of the ideas from the final third of the ten-episode season are set up and teased in the first two installments. There’s still a very episodic nature to each entry’s stories, but this thoughtful plotting is appreciated. It helps the season figure out what are the best stories to tell this season, but also how to naturally tie them all together and have them build upon each other. At the same time, this season also features what’s ostensibly a clip show, which is a concession that further speaks to the show spinning its wheels. Granted, there’s still plenty of new material in this episode and there’s actually quite a clever concept that causes everyone to reflect upon their previous sexual conquests and embarrassments. However, this still doesn’t change the fact that this is an episode where there’s plenty of reused material. The same idea could just as easily be explored without copious old footage.

The importance of family is a major tenet to Big Mouth’s sixth season, which lights a fire under everyone as they learn new things about themselves and where they best belong. These changes are radical for some individuals–like Jay’s knowledge over his half-brother–and each family goes through their own crises and epiphanies, even if none are more troubling than the idea of an undetermined number of Bilzerians being out there in the world (which also allows Jason Mantzoukas to really go to town this seasons with variations on a perverted theme). It’s smart for this season of Big Mouth to juxtapose young love with relationships that are at the opposite end of the spectrum in order to highlight what it takes to sustain decades of romance after that initial spark takes place. This all speaks to the show’s larger themes that everyone is different and what’s a mess for some may be bliss for another family. This season reaches some genuinely sweet sentiments beneath all of this heightened crudeness. 

Big Mouth’s core cast is at its strongest, but this season also works hard to reconcile some of the more disparate elements and characters from the series, like Coach Steve and the Ghost of Duke Ellington. Coach Steve has become a progressively waning presence, but these episodes allow him to occupy a greater role. His absence has previously worked, but enough time has now passed where this character is fun again and he’s a welcome figure who’s not overused. Along those lines, these new Big Mouth episodes also introduce several tertiary characters who are older and at the mercy of completely different hormonal problems.These digressions are infrequent enough that they properly compliment the younger teens’ problems, but still allow Big Mouth to get into slightly more adult material that would have previously been impossible to touch upon in this show.

Additionally, Big Mouth’s Hormone Monsters and its menagerie of supernatural creatures are in fine form here. There are now more creatures  than ever before as characters like Andrew begin to gain new familiars, like a Lovebug of his own. This season doesn’t feel as compelled to create more monsters for niche needs. At this point–plus with what’s been introduced in Human Resources–there’s more than enough, especially when all of these entities are mingling together and getting involved in each other’s territory. 

There’s a similar structure to each season of Big Mouth, which occasionally means that the new puberty hurdles that are faced become the year’s biggest talking points. This season involves plenty of increasingly mature ideas to deconstruct and provide commentary on, such as long-distance relationships through sexting and webcam nudity, hookup houses, asexuality, and the dangers of domesticating and changing a partner. There’s also a very special anthology episode devoted to the many forms of “vagina shame” that touches on everything from grooming habits to irregular menstruation flow to yeast infections. It’s one of the strongest, most insightful installments of the series. Big Mouth is always at its best when its conflicts come from real places. However, this season also isn’t afraid to indulge in broader and more supernaturally-driven storylines. There’s a body swap Freaky Friday scenario, but this broad idea is used to reach important emotional truths rather than an easy excuse to get silly. It’s a way for these characters to gain empathy towards the obstacles in their lives as well as comedically put to bed a season’s worth of conflict.

Many of Big Mouth’s grander ideas remain the same and even if these fall flat for audiences they’re still built upon a solid comedic foundation. Lightning-paced pop culture reference and self-aware meta gags are still in common rotation. There are also plenty of cute musical numbers that are used as easy ways to express some of Big Mouth’s bigger unifying themes. Most of these musical interludes blend together, but they’re still playful, entertaining distractions. If nothing else, Big Mouth remains genuinely funny when it comes to its dialogue and jokes. The subject matter and animation might not work for audiences, but it’s still a show that’s easy to laugh at, purely when it comes to jokes, rather than over-analyzing the squirrelly issues that some have with the show’s very existence and its puberty-driven comedy. There are also some cute references to the Human Resources spin-off that work well enough and fill in the blanks for those who never bothered to check it out.

Season six of Big Mouth is a rejuvenated return that’s got more juice than last season and also has more to say with the ongoing maturity of its characters. This season is a definite improvement, but it also works better in chunks where the episodes can be appreciated on their own instead of getting lost in a lengthy binge-watch where the similar storylines all start to blur together. There’s fresh life in this season of Big Mouth, but it still feels like the show is in its endgame and recycling old ideas. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for the upcoming seventh season, that’s already been confirmed, to wrap up this series while it still has something to say. One additional season beyond that seems like the most that Big Mouth should attempt while it’s still having fun and before it becomes the old creep telling tired jokes at the kids’ table.

Big Mouth’s ten-episode sixth season premieres October 28th on Netflix