^{Credit: Mating Season (Netflix)}

It’s Big Mouth… with animals! That’s the reaction most people had when the new series from Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin, Andrew Goldberg, and Nick Kroll was announced. It’s not an inaccurate description. Mating Season not only echoes Big Mouth’s visual style and outrageous humor, but it even includes some of the same voice talent. Kroll voices a raccoon who sounds and looks a lot like Nick Birch, although this animal has a much more successful sex life. Your enjoyment of Mating Season will largely hinge on whether or not you were a Big Mouth fan. Many on Animation Twitter will act like they’re above an adult animated sitcom where a bear gets his penis bitten off. I’m not, however.

Mating Season is the third animated series from this team, the second being Human Resources. Where that Big Mouth spinoff was a workplace comedy, Mating Season is closer to a hangout sitcom like Friends or Seinfeld. The series centers on a close-knit group of animal friends. In addition to the aforementioned raccoon Ray (Kroll), there’s a newly dumped bear named Josh (Zach Woods), a deer with daddy issues named Fawn (June Diane Raphael), and a lesbian fox named Penelope (Sabrina Jalees). When the critters aren’t talking about their sexual exploits and relationships at the Watering Hole bar, they’re moving back in with their parents, confronting repressed memories, or pondering the age-old question: marry, f***, kill - Alvin, Simon, Theodore. The answer is surprisingly obvious.

Since the main characters are animals, they naturally don’t have Hormone Monsters, Depression Kitties, or Anxiety Mosquitoes. This makes sense, although Mating Season lacks some of the previous two shows’ magical realism as a result. Granted, talking animals fall under the magical realism umbrella, but it’s not like we haven’t seen this before. We even got another adult talking animal show earlier this year with Amazon’s Kevin. That said, Mating Season does make better use of its concept than Kevin did. Like Big Mouth, it walks a fine line between clever and cringe. For example, the equivalent of online dating in the forest is smelling another animal's pee. That weirdly tracks.

A revolving door of interspecies relationships also keeps matters fresh. Ray struggles to keep up with a rabbit who screws like… well, a rabbit, while Josh falls for a runaway show horse in a romance out of Notting Hill. While interspecies pairs generally aren’t frowned upon, Penelope does face prejudice for falling in love with a hound named Summer, voiced by Abbi Jacobson. Any Disney fans who wrote an LGBTQIA+ fan fic for The Fox and the Hound (they’re out there) will surely feel seen. Some relationships are played for laughs, like when Josh falls for a femme fatale mink. Yet, I did find myself getting surprisingly emotionally invested as Josh makes beautiful music with a goose, even if it ends on a sour note.

The core friend group has a fun dynamic as well, with the voice cast bringing a genuine appeal to these characters. Ironically, for a show called Mating Season, it’s more about platonic friendship. Like How I Met Your Mother, dating and mating play a significant role, but the show focuses just as much on the friendships that see you through the search for love. The characters are bound to see more breakups than long-term relationships. As long as a pack has your back, though, you’ll never truly hibernate alone.

While Mating Season is essentially Big Mouth with animals, it also manages to be something else. Something bold and groundbreaking? No, but the show has just enough of an identity to distinguish it from what came before. That said, if Big Mouth wasn’t for you, Mating Season’s brand of crude comedy isn’t going to win you over either. For those who’ve been experiencing withdrawal ever since Nick and Andrew ventured into the Great Unknown, though, Mating Season should fill the void in your big mouth.

Nick Spake is the Author of Bright & Shiny: A History of Animation at Award Shows Volumes 1, 2, and 3. Available Now!