In the first minute of Netflix’s animated comedy Mating Season, a bear wakes up, urinates uncontrollably across his cave, stumbles outside, sees two horny raccoons banging away, then spirals into a deep well of shame about it. At this stage, it is barely worth pointing out that Mating Season is the spiritual successor to the outrageous, witty comedy Big Mouth, so completely does it inhabit that show’s DNA.
And at this point, you will already know if the show is for you or not. Because Big Mouth, as popular as it was, polarised audiences like little else. That show was about the horrors of puberty and sexual awakening, and it was tailored with absolute precision to its target audience of hormone-battered adolescent boys. You could argue that it did this a little too precisely, because its juvenilia was so relentlessly nuclear-powered that plenty of people found themselves turned off by all the sex and farts and swearing.
Quite honestly, it was their loss. Once you managed to peel back all the layers of overt offensiveness, Big Mouth might just have qualified as one of the sweetest shows on television. Adolescent boys are a confusing mix of full confidence and extreme awkwardness, and Big Mouth captured both in equal measure. If you’re a certain type of male of a certain type of age, it was a given that you’d see yourself in one of the characters.
That’s a little harder to achieve with Mating Season, though, because here all the characters are animals, and sex isn’t so much recreational as key to survival. Josh, the aforementioned urinating bear (voiced by Zach Woods), has realised that it is literally mating season. After hibernating for too long, he is dismayed to learn that his girlfriend has run off with a hulking great alpha bear. As such, he ends up forlornly unable to choose whether to – as he says – “devote myself to masturbation,” or to get back on the horse. Which in terms of this show is barely even a metaphor.
On the surface, this is a story about the newly dumped. Across its 10 episodes, Mating Season follows Josh as he variously hits the apps, engages in spiritually unfulfilling sexual experimentation and comes to a vague sense of equilibrium. But, like Big Mouth, the spine of the show is basically just a placeholder for lots of other weirdness.
Much of this is perpetuated by co-creator Nick Kroll’s character, an extremely confident raccoon. The character gives Kroll plenty of opportunities to do what he does best, which is to shout disgusting things as loudly as he can, but it also serves a necessary function. The worst part of being young and single is the assumption that everyone else is having the sex of their lives, and Kroll’s raccoon is living proof of that.
However, once again, all the characters are biologically accurate animals – governed by an entirely different set of impulses to humans. And this means there’s a little more disconnect between the characters and the audience than the creators probably expected.
There is, for example, an entire episode about the copulatory tie (the moment when a male canine’s bulbus glandis swells, while the female’s vaginal muscles contract around it, locking them together), while much is also made of the hippopotamus’s ritual of spraying their mate with faeces. No kink-shaming, obviously, but the show is so tied to animal behaviour – “Express your anal glands all across my goddamn pelt!” screams Kroll’s character in the middle of copulation – that it becomes less a relatable story of sexual development and more a study in ‘hey, aren’t animals gross?’.
Another thing that Mating Season does – and I’m going to let you decide whether this is a good thing or not – is exploit the Disneyfication of its characters. Bears and deer and raccoons were all well-worn character types in the classic hand-drawn Disney movies of the last century. When you see them, you can’t help but think of Bambi or Baloo the bear, or Meeko from Pocahontas, so it’s weird when they all start rutting with abandon.
To make it even more explicit, the 1941 Disney short The Little Whirlwind features a scene where Mickey Mouse becomes so entranced by the smell of a freshly baked cake that the scent physically picks him up and floats him towards it. There is a variation of that trope here, only the character ends up floating towards an animal’s anus, muttering “Nummy nummy nummy”.
Nevertheless, once you get over this, we’re left with another truly disgusting sex comedy that has much more heart than anyone will ever give it credit for. If it sticks around and matures, like Big Mouth did, we might have something special on our hands.