Big Mouth Review

Nick Kroll and his childhood friend Andrew Goldberg built Big Mouth from their own suburban New York adolescence, with Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, and Kroll voices his younger self along with much of the cast, including Maurice, the raspy hormone monster who haunts his best friend Andrew (John Mulaney). Puberty as a haunting by a sex-obsessed creature only its host can see is both the joke and the thesis.

It is crude in the way adolescence is crude, and unusually careful with it: episodes take on periods, Planned Parenthood, anxiety and depression, David Thewlis makes the Shame Wizard a truly menacing villain, and Mark Rivers' songs are better than they need to be. Maya Rudolph won two Emmys as Connie the hormone monstress and is the best thing in it, and Jason Mantzoukas's Jay is funny beyond reason. Jenny Slate stepped down as Missy in 2020 so a Black actress could voice her; Ayo Edebiri took over.

The Titmouse animation is deliberately rubbery and ugly, which suits the subject but gives the eye little. At its peak The A.V. Club's Erik Adams said it belonged in any conversation about television's animated greats; by the seventh season the reviews had cooled, its Metacritic score down from a peak of 90 to 68, and the jokes were repeating.