Season Review: Big Mouth Season Seven

Overview:

Big Mouth‘s gaggle of gross puberty-bound guinea pigs experience some of their biggest changes ever when their exodus from Bridgeton Middle School gets them to reexamine who they are, who they want to be, and who they want to be around. New responsibilities, fears, and friends make sure that Andrew, Nick, and Jessi will never forget their final year of middle school and what their futures bring.

Our Take:

“Changes” have been an integral Big Mouth element from its start and it’s something that the show proudly reminds the audience of whenever its theme song begins to blare. Big Mouth’s changes have largely been bodily in nature, but its seventh and penultimate season gets Nick, Andrew, and Jessi ready for the tangible and educational changes that come with their transition into the hormonal halls of high school. “Why would high school be good if life is bad?” is a question that Jessi poses early in Big Mouth’s season premiere that becomes a recurring thought experiment over the course of these ten episodes, which contain some of Big Mouth’s most confident and creative installments, even if the series feels increasingly superfluous and that its best days are past it. Season seven’s fresh changes are for real and a good time for lapsed viewers to get back on board.

Big Mouth has been exceedingly horny from the jump as soon as its sexually clumsy characters started seventh grade. Now, seven seasons in, the surprisingly educational comedy series prepares its characters for the upcoming changes that come alongside their shift into high school–a place where people “are supposed to fuck” and PDA is sanctioned. Social pressures get magnified and are suddenly at an all-time high for a cast of characters who already think about all of these things more than they should. These new episodes don’t shy away from high school’s many sources of anxiety, but Big Mouth is also sure to reiterate that high school can be a great, formative time for many teenagers who finally find their people and are able to come out of their shells socially, creatively, and psychologically.

Reinvention is the name of the game as high school provides a chance for new beginnings for each character. Meanwhile, Big Mouth is presented with comparable opportunities as it enters a bigger environment that facilitates a litany of new individuals and compulsions. Big Mouth certainly doesn’t squander these opportunities for reinvention. It stays true to its core values and never stops feeling like the same show even if it casts a much wider net with its characters and storytelling. Big Mouth explores some satisfying extremes through its characters who engage down this new path as both individuals and a collective. Andrew, for instance, wants to rebrand as “Drew” and erase years’ of clunky baggage, while Nick is confident that he’ll coast through high school because his sister, Leah, already attends and he’s a “legacy kid.” Missy struggles to reconcile the intelligent and hormonal sides of her identity and how to find a balance between them in high school. Lola, of course, just wants anarchy. 

Everyone’s standard melodrama gets amplified in this pressure cooker as individuals figure out who they really are, which sometimes means that their old friends no longer fit into their new lives. All of these unique goals help Big Mouth’s seventh season cover quite a bit of territory across ten episodes that easily feel like the show’s biggest year in every sense of the word. Andrew, Nick, and Jessi experience new personal milestones this season, but Big Mouth itself also heads to more expansive territory, like in its season finale, “The International Show.” “Special” episodes are nothing new for Big Mouth, but “The International Show” highlights how different countries around the world experience and approach puberty, sexual curiosity, and shame. It’s one of the show’s best episodes in years and it somehow also fits in an original Lin-Manuel Miranda song about pubic hair. Alternatively, there are heightened concepts from other episodes like a literal dive into different sexual subreddits, like they’re Wreck-It Ralph, that feel forced and not indicative of Big Mouth’s best work.

Big Mouth’s transition over to high school becomes a strong way to bookend the season, but there’s plenty to these episodes that don’t rely upon this device for dramatic tension. Characters discover new and disturbing facets of themselves when they’re put in strange, sexual scenarios that include Jessi’s strange preoccupation with breastfeeding, Andrew’s temporary self-pleasure sabbatical, or Nick’s addiction to kid steroids. You know, average teenager problems. The push and pull of Andrew and Nick’s relationship as best friends also gets tested in new ways that feel like they’ll have lasting consequences for Big Mouth’s final season. Big Mouth touches upon some sweet territory (its dive into asexuality is particularly touching), but there are still plenty of sequences that toe the line between disturbing and endearing as these teen characters have heart-to-heart conversations with anthropomorphic versions of their genitals.

Big Mouth gets somewhat cyclical with its ideas and rotating relationship drama, but it’s still an incredibly sharp comedy on a writing level. This season finds many cute ways to address its own longevity and its increasingly cumbersome continuity across seven seasons. These episodes are packed with dense, joke-filled dialogue that’s frequently much stronger than the sum of the episode’s parts. It’s details like this that have helped Big Mouth become Netflix’s longest original animated series.

This season’s slowed down tempo is a perfect example of how Big Mouth stretches out what’s left of its story rather than pushing it along at an organic pace, but its jokes and characters still connect. Everyone’s trek to high school could have been covered in this season rather than drawing it out to be a two-year affair. This pacing allows Big Mouth to claim that it makes narrative progress, but it’s not willing to truly take risks in this department. That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of surprising plotting and nonsensical developments in Big Mouth‘s seventh season, but the broader trajectory for this year (and for what’s presumably ahead in season eight) feels very safe and obvious.

Big Mouth, after seven seasons, is still just as crude, caring, and cathartic as ever. The road to high school is full of many changes that prove that Big Mouth still has plenty to say, even if it’s slightly repetitive and occasionally draws diminishing routines. It properly sets the stage for a strong final season that will hopefully allow this long-running animated series to end with a little grace, but lots of awkward hormones.

Big Mouth’s seventh season is available to stream on October 20th, only on Netflix