‘Big Mouth’ Is Still the Most Hilariously Gross Show on TV

Midway through the new season of Netflix‘s animated comedy Big Mouth, middle schooler Matthew (Andrew Rannells) frets, “I don’t want to overstay my welcome like The Office after Steve Carell left.”

It’s the sort of meta humor which Big Mouth loves(*) only slightly less than it loves jokes about erections, orgasms, menstruation, sex with couch cushions, inappropriate fantasies, and every other indignity of early adolescence. It’s not hard to blame Matthew for worrying. This is the seventh season of Big Mouth, and even though there’s only one more planned after this, spending seven years depicting life in middle school is only a slightly lesser elongation of time than M*A*S*H needing 11 years to chronicle a war that only lasted for two.

(*) Later in the same episode, when Jessi (Jessi Glaser) says that the show has been entirely about how terrible middle school is, Caleb (Joe Wengert) tells her, “Please do not break the fourth wall. We just had it repaired.”

But if this new batch of Big Mouth keeps apologizing for how long it’s spent in this era of its characters’ lives, it also has its eye on the future. Much of this season involves Nick (co-creator Nick Kroll), Andrew (John Mulaney), Jessi, Missy (Ayo Edebiri) and the rest of the gang getting ready for life after Bridgeton Middle. They visit the local high schools, get to know older kids, and learn how much more intense and scary sex can be at that age. And before the season is out, everyone has begun ninth grade. 

Even without this, though, Big Mouth shouldn’t have many regrets about how slowly it moved through time before now. No matter the grade its characters are in, it remains one of the most reliable, inventive, and, yes, disgusting laugh machines in all of television.

Season Seven continues to offer all of that, even as it’s dramatically shifting its world and adding lots of new characters, like Danni (Zazie Beetz), the older girl who traps a smitten Nick in the Friend Zone, or high school power couple Timon (Chloe Fineman) and Pumbaa (Jon Daly). Characters hope to reinvent themselves in a new environment, like Andrew dubbing himself “Drew” in the hopes that no one in high school will be aware that his Bridgeton classmates rightly voted him “Grossest Human.” But changing your image, and your behavior, is a lot harder than switching to a nickname, and one of this season’s funniest episode involves Andrew — a bunch of different Andrews, in fact — repeatedly traveling back through time to find and prevent the incident that forever branded him as a pervert.

We see other characters evolving in interesting ways. For most of the series, for instance, Matthew has grudgingly tolerated the presence of Caleb, whose autism spectrum disorder can manifest itself in extremely rigid, socially inappropriate behavior. But as they prepare for high school, Matthew realizes that he’s grown genuinely fond and protective of Caleb, and that Caleb’s bluntness has its advantages in certain situations. It’s sweet in a way that the series so often manages to be, even as Andrew and Matthew’s shared hormone monster Maury (Kroll again) is making the most disgusting suggestions imaginable.

There are also stories about the dangers of bad hookups — this one accompanied by a musical number featuring Megan Thee Stallion as Danni’s hormone monster Megan, about the asexual Elijah (Brian Tyree Henry) wondering if he would enjoy masturbation, and Jessi developing an uncomfortable fascination with watching her stepmom nurse Jessi’s baby sister. And in case there was any doubt the show had run out of ideas, the annual off-format episode presents a series of short stories from around the globe so that Connie (Maya Rudolph) can prove to Maury that kids in every country are just as sex-obsessed as Andrew, Missy, and the rest.

Deep down, Kroll and company seem to recognize that it’s OK they’ve taken this long to let the kids graduate from Bridgeton Middle. As Caleb puts it at one point, “I think people just want the show they’ve always tuned in for.” Thankfully, viewers will continue to get just that.

Season Seven of Big Mouth premieres October 20 on Netflix. I’ve seen all 10 episodes.

From Rolling Stone US.