In its home run of a third season, Big Mouth lasers in on the #MeToo movement, delivering stories at once thoughtful and uproarious about issues familiar to anyone who’s ever been a middle-school girl, including toxic masculinity, rape culture, and internalized misogyny.
Yet there’s nothing preachy about Big Mouth-instead, it’s an after school special for the twenty-first century, sucking the moralizing out of the formula to instead combine insightful commentary about formative, zeitgeist-y challenges with side-splitting humor.
In Netflix’s Big Mouth, after school specials have finally found a worthy successor. Groundbreaking as they were in tackling thorny subjects like eating disorders and substance abuse, they earned a reputation as preachy, prescriptive, and sometimes hokey. Remember after school specials? Informative and educational, they ruled the after school television block for a quarter of a century, aiding thousands of young people in fine-tuning their developing sense of morality.