Mating Season review: Krolls new show isn't Big Mouth — and that's OK

Big Mouth was a revelation when it premiered in 2017: a vulgar Netflix series about tweens and teens that pushed the boundaries of what animation could get away with, while also finding surprising poignancy in the pain of growing up. The show ran for eight seasons, spawned a spinoff and ended in 2025.

In its absence, Nick Kroll and his co-creators have returned with Mating Season, a new Netflix series that shares plenty of Big Mouths DNA but isn't a direct replacement. Created by Andrew Goldberg, Nick Kroll, Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, Mating Season shifts from the humiliation of puberty to the messiness of young adulthood — and it does so with animals.

The cast includes a newly single beta-male bear (Zach Woods), a horny raccoon (Nick Kroll), a self-assured deer with terrible dating luck (June Diane Raphael) and a blossoming lesbian fox (Sabrina Jalees), and much of the action plays out at a bar called The Watering Hole.

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