Created by Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin, Mating Season serves as a spiritual sequel to Big Mouth, the team’s earlier Netflix series. Like that ribald tour through the teenage sexual unconscious, the animated series is equal parts accepting and satirical of its characters’ sex drives. The distinction, of course, is that rather than sharing second-period math class, these characters all shit in the woods.
Mating Season takes place in a world where forest animals have some approximation of human-style civilization—language, nuclear families, gay bars, and so on—but still live in the wild. Funerals culminate with buzzards being invited to gruesomely devour the corpse of a loved one, and mammalian sexual encounters end up with the male and female stuck together for a while as they wait for their naughty bits to disgorge.
The series follows a group of four friends as they navigate something resembling adult sexuality, filtered through the oddities of zoology. They each embody distinct, Sex and the City-style approaches to sex and love: Josh (Zach Woods) is a sensitive bear processing a recent traumatic break-up; Ray (Kroll) is an insatiable raccoon whose horn-doggedness may be rooted in an insecure attachment to his mother (who once tried to eat his face, as raccoons sometimes do); Fawn (June Diane Raphael) is a hot doe coping with the typical disappointments that come with dating; and Penelope (Sabrina Jalee) is a shy fox pining over a long-lost love.
The group’s sexual misadventures are explored through branching plots with clever parallels and intersections. Episode three, for instance, takes its title, “The Lull,” from pretty-girl Fawn’s realization that she’s going to have to take advantage of the awkward end-of-date pause and initiate a kiss for the first time in her life. Meanwhile, Josh deals with the existential drift of having to move back in with his parents, Ray finds having a rabbit as a fuckbuddy may not be as thrilling as it first seemed, and Penelope’s trip to a fortune teller reveals that she’s being held back by something from her past. They’re all, in some sense, stuck in idle.
The episodes’ tight structure, where the characters’ stories resonate with a central concept and periodically intersect (often at the local pub, the Watering Hole) give the impression of a classically constructed sitcom. But this is also an animated comedy in 2026, so rapid-fire absurdity and profanity is a prerequisite: There are jokes about the use of snail mucous as lubricant (“The Lull”), Fawn’s wolf-boyfriend marking his territory all over her apartment (“The Truth About Canada”), and frog spawning turning into an orgy (“The All-Nighter”).
Most of these mile-a-minute jokes land just fine, but many lack the oomph that Big Mouth’s jokes about jizz-stained couch cushions once had. This is, in part, due to the change of setting. These are animals, not teenagers, so of course they rub snail mucous on their genitals.
Big Mouth put adults’ voices in the bodies of children to give itself room to be as grotesquely honest about teen sexuality as possible, and Mating Season seems to want to do something similar by wrapping human voices in animal fur and getting at some truth about how we approach sex. It does, but the series doesn’t feel like it’s tapping into our previously repressed psycho-sexual thoughts—making Mating Season beside the point in a way Big Mouth never was.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
