Critic Reviews

Broadly relatable, and inventively illustrated. .... “Mating Season” retains enough profanity and playfulness to create a distinct family resemblance with its predecessor, if not deliver a one-to-one subs[t]itute.

It’s a raunchy, smart sex comedy that happens to feature forest animals.

Each of its 25-minute-or-so episodes mine comedy gold and will make you shoot water out of your nose at least once. But underneath its potty-mouthed humor, it’s sweet, accentuating how true-blue friendships can help each other survive the calamities of the dating and mating scene.

Mating Season doesn't reinvent the wheel, and any fan of Big Mouth has seen it all before, but because the new series doesn't need to rely on shock value, it can get straight to what it wants to do without feeling forced to compete with the past.

Human Resources had a conceptual looniness that Mating Season lacks, improved as it went and then, naturally, was canceled after two seasons. Mating Season offers plenty of amusement and the potential for growth is clear.

What’s most interesting is that “Mating Season” gets better when it stops trying to be “Big Mouth 2,” allowing the writers and voice cast to play adult idiots with the same horny glee as they did their teenage ones for years, but turn them into characters that stand on their own four feet.

Mating Season seems to want to do something similar by wrapping human voices in animal fur and getting at some truth about how we approach sex. It does, but the series doesn’t feel like it’s tapping into our previously repressed psycho-sexual thoughts—making Mating Season beside the point in a way Big Mouth never was.

Disgusting? You bet. But there’s nothing in “Mating Season” that would stir the kind of passion that warrants calling the cops — or even animal control.

Mating Season has a couple of chuckleworthy moments in the first episode, but it’s trying too hard to be “adult” to give the characters a chance to develop.