‘Mating Season’ Review: ‘Big Mouth’ Team’s Netflix Comedy Offers Raunchy Animal Laughs but Could Have Used More Heart

Back in 1999, the puckish troubadours and cultural anthropologists in the band Bloodhound Gang exhorted, “You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it how they do on the Discovery Channel.” 

Wise words, still to this day.

The video for the song, driven by all manner of double entendres, featured the members of the group dressed as monkeys and marauding around Paris enacting the similarities between the human sex drive and more traditionally depicted animal instincts. 

It’s the same general sentiment, reversed, that drives Mating Season, a new Netflix animated comedy from Big Mouth creators Andrew Goldberg, Nick Kroll, Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett. 

Set among the horny and adorable woodland denizens of an unspecified forest, Mating Season argues that while its characters may be nothing but mammals (and the occasional bird, insect or reptile), they all do it like they do on the Euphoria channel, which fittingly happens to stream in tandem with Discovery. 

The result is a series that’s raunchy, silly and occasionally emotionally sincere, though initially without quite as much sincerity as Big Mouth, which was often one of my favorite shows on television during its eight-season, 81-episode run. Based on the 10 Mating Season episodes sent to critics, there’s an ample dose of anthropomorphizing that makes it easy to relate to the furry characters, but there’s no indication of the sort of universalizing spirit that made Big Mouth such a provocative and progressive exercise in empathy. I laughed a lot and only felt a little during, and about, these episodes, which seem content to settle for cuteness over compassion and salaciousness over sentiment.

Mating Season is built around a quartet of pals facing the ups and downs and ins and outs of animal love. 

Zach Woods voices Josh, a bear who oversleeps at the end of hibernation season, long enough for his long-term romantic partner to leave him for a more virile, awake bear. Josh is insecure and very much in love with the idea of falling in love, which puts him at philosophical odds with Ray (Nick Kroll), his best friend and general raccoon-about-town. Ray is willing to have, and probably has had, sex with anything in the wilderness that moves, a hedonism prompted in some way by an absent mother who tried to eat him when he was young.

Then there’s Fawn (June Diane Raphael), a doe grieving the Bambi-style death of her mother, a trauma that has her leaping into a series of ill-advised relationships. It’s hard to exactly tell, but Fawn may be living with Penelope (Sabrina Jalees), a gay fox haunted by a mysterious incident in Canada and frustrated by her lack of game, in the romantic sense and not in the hunted wild animal sense. 

Josh’s concrete concern is finding somebody or something to mate with before the next hibernation begins, but all four animals are seeking companionship for the short or long term over a fully serialized season that features sad Canadian flashbacks, loopy hallucinations on horny goat weed, an agrarian sex cult, a tropical destination wedding and an almost non-stop torrent of enthusiastically humping animals.

One of the most charming aspects of Big Mouth, a show whose psychological specificity spoke to me more directly than anything in Mating Season, was always its accuracy. Sure, the show had depression kitties and shame wizards and the ghost of Duke Ellington, but if Big Mouth told you a gross or random fact about puberty, you could assume that somebody had done at least superficial research.

The same is true with Mating Season, the watching of which is like reading a Wikipedia entry accompanied by a very immature 12-year-old, which I only mean as a compliment. The series is a running string of information that made somebody on the writing staff giggle, whether it’s something as prurient as the “copulatory tie,” a penetrative conundrum that gives the first episode its title, or as generally innocuous as the utilitarian purpose of the bizarrely thick-but-loose skin of the honey badger.

“We always have time for animal facts,” a honey badger observes and, watching Mating Season with Google handy, that contention appears to be true. 

Now are the actual depictions of animal sex biologically on-point? Especially when it comes to inter-species interactions? I limited my research on that front, but it’s my assumption that whatever verifiable information the series provides, bears and horses, just as one example, definitely do not and probably cannot have sex. Do they want to, though? Who’s to say?

After all, there has to be a line for how much precision you can expect from a show in which animated animals are each allotted a single piece of human clothing or accessory, including Ray’s bright red trainers, Penelope’s ragged vest, Josh’s jaunty neck handkerchief — he laments that ties make him look like Yogi Bear — and Fawn’s necklace/pendant. The animal kingdom on the show is presented as generally analogous to that of humans, right down to the streaming service MiceFlix, which is not a very sophisticated joke, but certainly worthy of a chuckle or two. 

Much of the humor in Mating Season tends closer to the surface, though you do get the spectacle of a forest-spanning mycelium explaining the difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset to a deer, which isn’t wholly unsophisticated. Still, Big Mouth very quickly became ambitious in its structure and tone, while Mating Season is, other than the Disney musical-inspired eighth episode, much more straightforward and much more interested in simply paralleling animal behavior and human behavior.

These animals are vaguely aware of many aspects of the human world — as a raccoon, Ray is a hoarder of man-made trinkets — including the fact that some humans dress up as animals as a kink, but the series doesn’t dwell on furries for long. For some this will be a pity, since several of the characters, especially Fawn’s swaggering ex, lone wolf Dylan (Timothy Olyphant), are designed to connect with viewers who probably connect with Disney’s foxy Robin Hood as well. The animation, courtesy of the prolific Titmouse studio (no titmice of the avian variety are featured, another missed opportunity, if you ask me), is bright, cutesy and entertaining, like a more polished, hornier version of the ’80s and ’90s Saturday morning cartoons the creators no doubt grew up watching. Specifically, imagine Hanna-Barbera’s short-lived Shirt Tales if the characters were having lots of sex.

The vocal ensemble of Mating Season is, unsurprisingly, pretty perfect, starting with Kroll’s manic energy and Woods’ impeccable insecurity, as well as Raphael and Jalees’ anxious charm. Olyphant leads a deep guest ensemble that also features the likes of Pamela Adlon as Ray’s trainwreck mom, Jack McBrayer as an owl who yearns to be part of the gang, Annaleigh Ashford and Andrew Rannells in the musical episode, Beck Bennett as a distressingly bro-y goat, the obligatory Jason Mantzoukas as a honey badger, and many, many more. 

While Mating Season isn’t directly connected to Big Mouth in any way, it might as well be, and it has a lot in common with Human Resources, Netflix’s actual Big Mouth spinoff. Both follow-up shows illustrate how the laughter from Big Mouth is easier to replicate than the heart, and how that heart was what elevated the show from “amusing” to “special.” Human Resources had a conceptual looniness that Mating Season lacks, improved as it went and then, naturally, was canceled after two seasons. Mating Season offers plenty of amusement and the potential for growth is clear, even if for now you’re mostly there to laugh at the boffing bunnies, amorous antelopes, defiling deer, randy raccoons and prurient ponies.