PLOT: Four animal friends navigate the pitfalls of finding true love in a forest full of frisky critters.
REVIEW: Millions of people all around the world wish that they could find love. Thankfully, love takes many forms, from monogamous unions to casual flings, thruples, polyamory, and more. In Mating Season, four friends look for love (or someone to be their +1 to Pound Town) in all the wrong places, creating a unique and entertaining exploration of animal instincts, carnal desires, and making up excuses to get your rocks off.
Mating Season comes from Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg, and Nick Kroll, collectively known as Brutus Pink, who, for the past several years, have had audiences clutching their pearls with the brilliant adult animated series Big Mouth. Like Big Mouth, Mating Season explores sexual habits in an unfiltered and unflinching manner. The comedic approach to a topic nestled within a fortress of social constructs won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s certainly for me. Mating Season‘s approach to sex, and sexual humor in general, is bold, refreshing, and downright hilarious. The writers give zero f**ks about offending anyone, yet the material remains unoffensive, at least in my experience.
Like people who are comfortable in their sexual identity, Mating Season is loud and proud in its depiction of open relationships, queer love, and the desire to hit it and quit it. The show makes a deliberate choice to keep everything consensual and respectful, even in the most extreme cases of flirtation and fornication. Nearly everyone in the show is “down to clown,” though motivations differ from character to character, establishing a sense of bodily autonomy across the cast.
At the center of ceaseless depictions of bedroom gymnastics are Ray (Nick Kroll), a sex-crazed raccoon with an Oedipus complex, Josh (Zach Woods), a socially-awkward brown bear with a red rocket sadder than Fozzie Bear’s jokebook, Fawn (June Diane Raphael), a straight, messy, and sexually frustrated deer, and Penelope (Sabrina Jalees), a queer fox who longs to connect with a special someone and feel accepted by her community. Each character contains multitudes (yes, even Ray), all displaying different wants and desires from a partner. Throughout the 10-episode season, Kroll and company explore a wide spectrum of relationships and aspects of hook-up culture, leaving few stones unturned while lampooning real-world facts and quirks about denizens of the animal kingdom.
One of my favorite aspects of Mating Season is how animal instincts and behaviors inform the overall presentation. I can’t begin to imagine the writers’ search history while researching animal quirks and mating habits to depict in the show, let alone the quick-draw of incognito windows. I’ve seen the comments section for Big Mouth, with large swaths of keyboard warriors expressing their distaste for the show’s depiction of the onset of puberty and sexual exploration among minors. It’s as if they’ve forgotten what it was like to be that age. How confused, horny, and terrified we all were. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Mating Season will elicit the same reactions, since we’re exploring the animal kingdom rather than the human condition. This dichotomy could make Mating Season an easier watch for prudes unwilling to approach filterless sexual comedy with honesty and enthusiasm.
While Mating Season isn’t as shocking or painfully familiar as Big Mouth, Brutus Pink’s new adult animated series is the next logical step in the group’s evolution. I laughed out loud more times than I could count, and I enjoy the chemistry and camaraderie between the four central characters. Mining the animal kingdom for all its curiosities and foreign rituals is a comedy goldmine, and Mating Season does an outstanding job of making that material oddly compelling and delightfully gross. Should the show get more seasons, I could see it flourishing like Big Mouth, with plenty of animals to introduce, sexual proclivities to lampoon, and friendship dynamics to explore and compare to humans who are just as confused about relationships as any member of the show.
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