With their new series titled Mating Season, the creators of Big Mouth invite us into the animal world to better deconstruct heteropatriarchal norms with raunchy jokes.
In the forest of Mating Season, the animals think only of one thing: mating. The moose lock antlers, raccoons discover polyamory, and lesbian vixens fall in love three times a week. Welcome to Netflix’s new animated series by Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg, the creators of Big Mouth. Here you’ll find the same raunchy humor we love, the same dialogue oscillating between barroom psychoanalysis and dirty jokes, but with a playing field much wider: an entire forest. Out go the middle-schoolers obsessed with their first erections and other hormonal upheavals. This time, this animated comedy turns the animal kingdom into a distorted mirror of our neuroses. Under its jokes about anal glands and its rutting scenes, Mating Season makes the forest a real laboratory of desire.
The method is as old as fables: using animals to talk about humans. And what better than the mating season to project into the wild world our unspoken desires, our dirtiest fantasies, and our emotional contradictions? Disney’s comparatively wholesome tales are a thing of the past, even if nods to the classics thread through the series, though here it’s more like a The Fox and the Hound where the vixen and the she-dog finger each other in a Jacuzzi…
Naughtiness, but not only
We laugh at this raccoon who sleeps with a nymphomaniac rabbit while preaching the virtues of polyamory, or at these animals unable to control their impulses without triggering an emotional catastrophe.
But the more Mating Season seeks to shock us, the more it reveals what lies behind its provocations. For beneath the orgies, the spectacular breakups, and the existential crises with fur and feathers, the series is ultimately about us. It interrogates our relationship to exclusivity, to true love, to solitude, to jealousy, and to all those insecurities that gnaw away at our lives. The more the characters become excessive, the more the situations tilt toward absurdity, and the more the rules we’ve erected around coupledom and desire appear fragile, artificial, or even frankly ridiculous.
