Big Mouth’s second season debuted last Friday, continuing the stories of Andrew, Nick, Jessi, Jay, and their high school classmates. I was a huge fan of the show from the first time I watched it. It’s disgusting, yet sweet; it’s serious, yet funny; it’s outlandish, yet real. It’s a show about a bunch of 13 year old kids going through puberty, but it manages to resonate with adults. Show creators Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg (childhood friends whom the show is loosely based on) do a great job of covering a lot of ground in ten episodes.
Upon watching the show’s second season, I had a ton of unorganized thoughts/observations/reactions. I can’t seem to come up with a coherent way to write them, so I’m just gonna list them all in no particular order:
-I’ll start with the most obvious one: this season was much darker in tone than the first. We meet the Shame Wizard, who, as his name would imply, makes the kids feel shameful about the bad/gross things they do. We also see Jessi nearly fall into the hands of the Depression Kitty, and Missy has a recurring vision in her mirror that makes her feel self-conscious. Could Big Mouth be following the same route as BoJack Horseman, another Netflix animated sitcom that started out generally light but gradually became darker?
-There was a looooooooooot of nudity in this season, even by Big Mouth standards. The standout example of this comes in the season’s second episode, What Is It About Boobs? In this episode, we meet Gina, a girl in the kids’ class who develops a little bit earlier than the other girls in class. The other girls in class become self-conscious about their bodies, and Missy’s mom ends up taking Missy and Jessi to a women’s spa, where we see an entire musical number about women loving their bodies. We also see Nick and his dad expose themselves, as well as a good deal of Coach Steve’s man boobs.
-We barely saw The Ghost of Duke Ellington in this season after Duke was a frequent character in the first season. I can think of several reasons for this. Many people felt as though Duke slowed down a lot of storylines in the first season, so it would make sense for Kroll and Goldberg to write less of him in this one. Also, with Nick finally getting his own Hormone Monster, we didn’t need Duke as the confidant that gives the viewer a window into Nick’s inner thoughts.
-Nick goes through several Hormone Monsters in this season. He starts off with Coach Steve’s old Hormone Monster (who retires after Steve loses his virginity), then gets a new Hormone Monster named Tyler. Tyler first appears by coming out of Nick’s wardrobe, which I thought would mean that Nick was going to be gay. I turned out to be wrong about that theory (for now), but at the end of the season Connie (the Hormone Monstress) is reassigned as Nick’s Hormone Monster. Does this mean Nick is transgender? Does it just mean he’ll be in touch with his feminine side? Does it mean anything at all? Am I just wildly speculating? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!
-The show gets more in-depth regarding several characters, including Coach Steve, Matthew, Lola, and the kids’ parents. It was cool to see more about these characters’ motivations and where they come from. (Side note: I loved the interactions between Andrew’s dad and Lola during Andrew and Lola’s brief relationship. Mr. Glouberman is up there with Creed Bratton and Jean-Ralphio Saperstein for me in terms of laughs per appearance.) (Other side note: the cast of this show is so good. There are too many people to list out, but look at the cast here.)
-It was funny to see the show become meta at some points, like when Nick basically turns into a real-life advertisement for Netflix during one of his conversations with Gina and the scene is abruptly cut short when he starts talking about sharing passwords.
Overall, this was a very solid season of TV. I personally enjoyed the first season better, but the second season was a nice follow-up and there’s definitely room for further development moving forward. I would give this season an 8.2/10, where the first was something like an 8.9.
Oh yeah, and one more thing…the original music in this season was good, but nothing compares to the Queen-style song from when Andrew thought he was gay in season one:
ReJoyce 