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‘Big Mouth’ Was Courageously Filthy ‘Til the End, but About So Much More Than Sex: TV Review

In its series finale, Nick Kroll's animated Netflix sitcom 'Big Mouth' was filthy 'til the end — and about so much more than sex.

With Hormone Monsters, the show’s signature metaphor and comic creation, as their Virgils, the characters of “Big Mouth” have explored everything from oral sex to erotica to enough masturbation to make the entire premise a smirking play on “coming of age” even without more conventional congress. These creatures personify the uncontrollable urges and insatiable desires that come with the first stirrings of adolescence — the voice telling you to rub one out in the bathroom or, as Mona’s charge Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Ayo Edebiri) does in Season 8, hump your robotics team’s final project to death. The thesis of “Big Mouth” is neatly summarized by a song in its penultimate episode: “There’s no such thing as normal / We’re each and all uniquely strange.” What could be treacly assurance á la “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was instead reinforced with gleeful profanity, like when a Miss Frizzle-esque sex ed teacher voiced by Natasha Lyonne takes the class on a Magic School Bus tour of a penis.

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