<em>Big Mouth</em> Grows Up (Kinda)
The animated Netflix series Big Mouth is a raucous, delightfully vulgar exploration of puberty. Created by Nick Kroll, Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin, and Andrew Goldberg, the show has never shied away from the grotesque banalities of adolescence. It’s a putrid circus of fluttering stomachs, tonsil hockey, and masturbation.
In Season 1, ’s bumbling young protagonists stumbled through the awkward changes of their early teen years with crude, cringeworthy humor. But the second season, out last Friday, brings with it a set of slightly more grown-up concerns. As their bodies continue to shift, the eighth-graders Nick (Kroll), Andrew (John Mulaney), Missy, reads the sign outside Bridgeton Middle School at the start of the second season’s fifth episode. Titled “The Planned Parenthood Show,” the episode begins with Coach Steve (also Kroll) telling the students, in extremely colorful language, that he’s now qualified to teach them sex education because he recently lost his virginity. “I hope you at least wore a condom,” Jessi notes, beginning an exchange in which the teens warn their adult coach about the pitfalls of unprotected sex.
