Netflix's Big Mouth season 5 has lost sight of what makes the show great after attempting to set up several new universes for the unashamedly crass series. Big Mouth has developed a massive following across its five seasons to date, with a glut of celebrity characters and cameo voices now attached to the project, which first won plaudits for its advertised shameless approach towards sex and the human body. Big Mouth is loosely based on Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg's formative years in suburban New York, where the two boys navigate the hellish landscape of puberty with the help of their assigned hormone monsters.
Big Mouth season 5, however, puts the pubescent boys' story on something of a hiatus in favor of introducing a raft of new hormone monsters to the series. Nick, Andrew, and Jesse are now accompanied by several Love Bugs and Hate Worms who fuel their passions and stoke their ire in equal measure, with the children's narrative agency greatly reduced in the four-month gap between the start and end of their latest semester at Bridgeton Middle School. Big Mouth season 5 also sees the introduction of the world of Human Resources ahead of the titular spin-off series - a place where the hormone monsters live and work in-between being assigned to pubescent children.
Yet by expanding the series' already zany lore and introducing the Human Resources characters, Big Mouth season 5 lost sight of what makes the show great in the first place. By shoehorning in lots of unnecessary monsters that did not warrant a season's worth of exposition, Big Mouth heavily dilutes season 5's ability to put its star, bankable characters front and center. Other scenes also fall markedly flat as Big Mouth season 5 goes too far in its attempts to set up the Human Resources monster spinoff, with the season desperately missing the teen angst that has so long formed the backbone of Big Mouth's watchability.
Big Mouth season 5 starts to feel increasingly like an audition for the new Human Resources characters as the season progresses, with the usual pitfalls of puberty and young love being replaced with a slew of nonsensical character entrances. The most glaring of these is Nick Kroll's ill-advised green-screen cameo as himself in the season finale, in which he claims responsibility for the Big Mouth universe and sets cartoon Nick onto a better path by telling him that all the hormone monsters are in fact facets of his own personality. Yet this admission essentially retcons the prior four seasons of Big Mouth, which were made so hilarious by the cajoling that the hormone monsters inflict on their paired teens and instead makes the monsters feel decidedly less impactful characters.
Big Mouth season 5's unashamed touting of the Human Resources world, therefore, needs to be quickly forgotten in favor of getting back to the stories of Nick, Andrew, and Jesse, which made the earlier seasons so compelling and dial back the monster-verse promotion in the process. The confirmation of Human Resources as its own series should allow Big Mouth season 6 to get back to the individual and utterly hilarious stories of its three primary characters in greater detail. Big Mouth was originally so appealing because it struck a chord with the adolescent memories of audiences everywhere, and so returning to the fictionalized teen years of Andrew Goldberg and Nick Kroll is essential to ensuring the Netflix series' continued success in the future.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/3CDvjqP
0 Comments