Netflix’s Mating Season Review: The Big Mouth Creators Are Back and Hornier Than Ever

If you have been feeling the void left by Big Mouth since it wrapped up its eight-season run in 2025, Netflix has heard your cry. The same twisted, brilliant, deeply committed creative team behind one of the streamer’s most beloved animated series has returned with Mating Season, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a raunchy, chaotic, strangely heartfelt comedy about woodland creatures trying to find love, connection, and a willing partner before the next hibernation cycle kicks in. Here at The Game of Nerds, we covered Big Mouth extensively from its very first season, and we were absolutely not going to let this one slip by without a proper breakdown. So buckle up, because things are about to get wild. Literally.

What Is Mating Season?

Mating Season premiered on Netflix on May 22, 2026, with a 10-episode first season. It was created by Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett, the exact same quartet responsible for Big Mouth. The show is not an official spinoff or sequel, but it wears its DNA openly and proudly. Netflix itself markets it as coming “from the twisted minds behind Big Mouth,” and the show even winks at its own lineage in one memorable episode where the main characters sit down to watch a fictional streaming show called “Big Mouse.” The joke lands because it is true: this is the same creative energy, the same irreverent commitment to using comedy as a vehicle for exploring universal human experiences, and the same refusal to shy away from things that make you laugh while simultaneously making you deeply uncomfortable.

The setup trades awkward tweens navigating puberty for something equally primal: four woodland animals navigating adult singledom in the forest. Josh, a timid grizzly bear voiced by Zach Woods, gets dumped by his girlfriend after he hibernates for too long. Ray, a sexually voracious raccoon voiced by Nick Kroll, is exactly who you would expect a raccoon to be. Fawn, a deer voiced by June Diane Raphael, is essentially the rom-com lead the forest never knew it needed. And Penelope, a lesbian red fox voiced by Sabrina Jalees, is searching for love with another lady while navigating a world that was not exactly designed with her in mind. Together, they hang out, catastrophically date, and regularly convene at their local watering hole, which is, of course, called the Watering Hole.

The Cast Is Perfect

Let’s start with what works, because there is genuinely a lot that works. The casting is excellent across the board. Zach Woods as Josh is an inspired choice, essentially serving the same narrative function that John Mulaney’s Andrew did in Big Mouth: the anxious, neurotic, deeply lovable everyman who means well and fumbles constantly. Woods brings a particular quality of soft-spoken panic to the role that makes every one of Josh’s failures feel both deeply relatable and deeply funny.

Nick Kroll doing Nick Kroll things as Ray the raccoon is exactly as comfortable and entertaining as you would expect. The man has spent nearly a decade voicing various iterations of chaotic, horny energy on animated television, and he has only gotten better at it. June Diane Raphael’s Fawn gets the season’s best individual arc, a slow-burn involvement with a difficult wolf voiced by Timothy Olyphant that plays out like a perfectly observed rom-com trope and lands the emotional beat it is going for right at the end. And Sabrina Jalees as Penelope brings genuine sweetness and specificity to a character whose storylines could easily have felt like an afterthought, and they do not.

The guest cast is stacked as well, with cameos from Sarah Silverman, Maya Rudolph, Abbi Jacobson, Jack McBrayer, and Andrew Rannells among others. In true Big Mouth tradition, the celebrity appearances feel integrated into the world rather than dropped in for shock value, and several of them genuinely elevate the episodes they appear in.

Season One Breakdown

The first season runs 10 episodes, each around 22 minutes, and follows a serialized structure that gives it more of a rom-com arc than a traditional animated sitcom. Every episode title begins with “The,” a small but effective stylistic choice that gives the season a storybook quality sitting just underneath all the animal chaos. The episodes tend to orbit a central concept and then let each of the four main characters’ storylines reflect that concept from different angles, periodically intersecting at the Watering Hole before sending everyone back to their respective disasters.

The strongest episodes are the ones that lean into the show’s rom-com influences most directly. Fawn’s arc with the wolf is the clear emotional spine of the season, and the writing trusts the audience enough to let it breathe across multiple episodes rather than resolving too quickly. Josh’s storyline about getting back out there after his breakup is the most grounded and the most reliably funny on a scene-to-scene basis. Penelope’s journey offers the most emotional sincerity, and her storylines hit harder in the back half once the season finds its footing. Ray exists largely to be ridiculous, and he succeeds completely at this.

The season is not without its wobbles. The early episodes lean a little too hard on shock value humor that does not always land as well as the quieter, character-driven jokes do. Some of the more elaborate set pieces, including a sequence involving an agrarian sex cult and another built around horny goat weed hallucinations, reach for big laughs and occasionally miss. But even the weaker moments tend to have at least one joke that redeems the scene entirely, which is very much the Big Mouth formula at work.

The good news: the season closes strong. The finale pulls all four storylines together with more emotional coherence than the setup promised, and it earns its quieter, more sincere moments because the show has done the work of making you care about all four animals by that point. By the end, you are invested. That is not nothing.

How Does It Compare to Big Mouth?

This is the question everyone is going to ask, and the honest answer is that it is complicated. Big Mouth had something uniquely specific working in its favor: the universal, visceral, mortifying experience of puberty. Every person who has ever been through it could see themselves in Andrew’s anxiety, Nick’s confusion, Jessie’s anger, or Missy’s sweetness. The Hormone Monsters were a metaphorical masterstroke precisely because they gave a shape and a voice to something that felt uncontrollable and humiliating. The show was raunchy, yes, but it was raunchy in service of emotional truth in a way that felt genuinely revelatory for a lot of viewers.

Mating Season is working in slightly less unique territory. Adult singledom has been covered extensively in live action television, from Friends to Sex and the City to approximately 200 other shows on Netflix alone. The animal setting gives the comedy a distinct visual language and some extra latitude to push the raunch factor, but it does not give the show the same emotional specificity that made Big Mouth feel like nothing else on television. There is also something that several critics have noted: the shock value hits a little differently when the characters are animals behaving like animals rather than children behaving like adults. The transgression that made Big Mouth so uncomfortable and funny in equal measure is harder to replicate when the characters are doing things that are, technically, just nature.

That said, Mating Season shares the DNA of Big Mouth in all the ways that matter. The same commitment to grounding absurdity in real emotional experience is present. The same willingness to let characters be genuinely messy and contradictory without judging them is here. The same formal inventiveness, the opening theme, the visual gags, the celebrity cameos, the mid-episode tonal shifts, shows up consistently. And the same core belief that raunchy comedy and genuine heart are not mutually exclusive runs through everything the show does.

If you loved Big Mouth because of how it made you feel seen, Mating Season might feel like a step back. If you loved Big Mouth because it made you laugh until something hurt, you are going to be just fine here.

Fan Reaction and What’s Next

Critical response to the first season has been broadly positive, landing at 75% on Rotten Tomatoes in its early reviews, with most critics agreeing that it is a worthy successor to the Big Mouth legacy even if it does not quite match its predecessor’s emotional peak. Fan reaction has skewed enthusiastic, particularly among longtime Big Mouth devotees who were ready to follow this creative team anywhere after eight seasons of devoted viewing. The Fawn and wolf storyline has become a particular point of discussion online, with many fans calling it the strongest single arc of the season.

As for the future: records from SAG-AFTRA indicate the series already has a two-season pickup order, meaning a second season is already in production. That vote of confidence from Netflix suggests the streamer sees real potential here, and honestly, so do we. The first season is a strong foundation, and the creative team behind it has shown with Big Mouth that they tend to find their real groove in seasons two and three, once the world is fully established and the characters have room to grow into themselves.

The Verdict

Mating Season is not Big Mouth, and it probably should not try to be. What it is, though, is a genuinely funny, occasionally sweet, frequently ridiculous animated comedy from some of the best people working in the genre right now. The cast is excellent, the premise has more room to run than it might initially seem, and by the time the finale lands, the show has earned enough goodwill to make you excited for wherever it goes next. It is not a perfect first season, but it is a promising and entertaining one, and for fans who have been missing the chaotic warmth of the Big Mouth universe since it ended last year, it absolutely fills that void.

Stream it. Watch all ten episodes. Enjoy Fawn’s wolf arc. Root for Josh to figure his life out. Let Ray be Ray. Mating Season is here, it is unhinged, and it is exactly what we needed.

Mating Season Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix. Rated TV-MA, 10 episodes.