The creators of Big Mouth, Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin, return to Netflix with Mating Season, an adult animated comedy that trades awkward teenagers for forest animals with equally complicated love lives. After eight seasons, Big Mouth concluded in 2025, leaving a gap that this new series moves into with familiar energy and a fresh coat of fur.
Set in an unnamed forest where animals enjoy partial human civilization while remaining subject to the ungovernable demands of biology, Mating Season follows four friends through the messy terrain of adult romantic life. Josh (Zach Woods) is a bear freshly dumped after oversleeping hibernation; Ray (Nick Kroll) is a raccoon whose appetite for companionship knows no species boundary; Fawn (June Diane Raphael) is a deer with a talent for falling for the wrong partner; and Penelope (Sabrina Jalees) is a gay fox carrying unresolved feelings for a long-lost love. The show is raunchy, frequently funny, episodic in structure, and warmer beneath the surface than its premise might suggest.
A Forest Built on Familiar Ground
The show’s central conceit works by transplanting familiar adult romantic-comedy territory, dating apps, commitment phobia, heartbreak, queer longing, into the animal kingdom, finding comedy in the gap between human emotional complexity and animal instinct. The world-building is inventive: “Tinklr” replaces app profiles with urine-sniffing, the gang’s regular haunt is a bar called the Watering Hole, and an in-world streaming service called MiceFlix delivers a wry, self-aware gag. A mock-David Attenborough voiceover periodically frames the search for a mate as the most consequential mission any creature can undertake.
Each episode is built around a central emotional concept that threads through the characters’ separate storylines before pulling them together, usually at the Watering Hole. It is a classically constructed sitcom format dressed in animated-comedy chaos. Serialized arcs give the season momentum: Josh cautiously re-entering the dating world; Ray genuinely falling for a goose voiced by Annaleigh Ashford, who brings musical ambition to the role; Penelope piecing together the wreckage of a Canadian relationship with ex Summer (Abbi Jacobson); and Fawn caught in a push-pull with wolf Dylan (Timothy Olyphant), an emotionally unavailable predator who also happens to howl at the moon.
The opening credits set the tone plainly: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” plays over real wildlife footage, a structural echo of its predecessor’s opening device and a clear declaration of the show’s sensibility.
Characters Worth Rooting For, Jokes Worth the Wait
The comedy operates on two registers simultaneously. Rapid-fire raunchy jokes share space with animal-fact gags grounded in genuine zoological detail, copulatory ties, honey badger skin density, rabbit reproductive rates, delivered with the unhinged enthusiasm of a nature documentary narrated by someone who finds all of it hilarious. A forest-wide mycelium network explains the difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset to a bewildered deer.
A frog-spawning scene slides into full orgy. Snail mucus is repurposed as lubricant. The comedy is at its sharpest when it builds from character logic rather than reaching for shock value; jokes about Ray’s performance-enhancing pills land because of who Ray is, and Dylan marking Fawn’s apartment with urine works because the show has established exactly what kind of wolf he is.
Josh anchors the show emotionally. Zach Woods brings a particular flavor of anxious sincerity that keeps the character sympathetic through his romantic missteps. Ray’s hedonism is given roots: a mother (Pamela Adlon) who once tried to eat him as a young raccoon has produced an adult with complicated feelings about attachment, and watching him stumble into genuine tenderness with the goose is the season’s most affecting thread. Fawn’s arc with Dylan is a clean, funny dissection of a recognizable romantic pattern, the person convinced they can domesticate someone fundamentally undomesticable, except here the man is urinating on her possessions and refusing to sleep indoors. Penelope is the quietest of the four, but her Canadian backstory carries real emotional weight.
The guest cast is exceptional and purposefully deployed. Timothy Olyphant, Annaleigh Ashford, Jason Alexander, Pamela Adlon, Jason Mantzoukas, Jack McBrayer, David Duchovny, Sarah Silverman, Abbi Jacobson, and Andrew Rannells all appear, folded into the main characters’ lives rather than arriving for isolated appearances.
Warmth in the Undergrowth
The friendships at the center of Mating Season carry real warmth. Josh and Ray function as mismatched brothers, their dynamic recognizable and affectionate, while Fawn and Penelope offer something rarer in the genre: two characters who lift each other up without manufactured rivalry. That warmth is what sustains the show when the comedy thins.
The animation by Titmouse studio is bright and deliberately evocative of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1980s and 90s, a visual register that makes the raunchiness land harder by contrast. A Disney-musical-inspired episode featuring Ashford and Andrew Rannells demonstrates genuine creative range when the show chooses to reach for it.
The early episodes are the weakest, as the writers visibly search for the show’s own identity. The raunchy animated format has shed the novelty it once carried, and Mating Season is at its best when character and cleverness drive the jokes rather than the spectacle alone. The romantic ground it covers, adult singledom, heartbreak, the search for connection, is well-mapped by live-action comedy, and the show rarely offers the kind of insight that makes familiar territory feel freshly explored. Patience through the opening episodes is rewarded, though the show’s ceiling in this first season sits below what this team has previously demonstrated they can reach.
Mating Season is an adult animated romantic comedy series that premiered globally on Netflix on May 22, 2026. Created by the team behind the hit series Big Mouth, the show takes a humorous and satirical look at the complexities of love, sex, and relationships by setting the action entirely within the animal kingdom. The series follows a cast of anthropomorphic forest creatures, including a bear named Josh, a raccoon named Ray, a doe named Fawn, and a fox named Penelope, as they navigate the universal challenges of finding a partner and dealing with the instincts that drive them. You can watch the entire series exclusively on Netflix.
Where to Watch Mating Season Online
Full Credits
Title: Mating Season
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: May 22, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Writers: Andrew Goldberg, Nick Kroll, Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett
Producers and Executive Producers: Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg, Nick Kroll, Chris Prynoski, Shannon Prynoski, Antonio Canobbio, Ben Kalina
Cast: Nick Kroll, Zach Woods, June Diane Raphael, Sabrina Jalees
The Review
Mating Season
Mating Season is an entertaining, occasionally sweet animated comedy that finds its footing once it stops leaning on its predecessor's shadow. The voice cast is exceptional, the world-building inventive, and the central friendships genuinely warm. It rarely digs as deep as it could, and the early episodes test patience, but the season builds into something worth watching. For fans of the creative team, it delivers enough. For everyone else, it is a capable, funny show that has room to grow.
PROS
- Exceptional voice cast with strong guest performances
- Inventive animal-world building with sharp comedic details
- Genuine warmth in the central friendships
- Improves significantly as the season progresses
- Creative musical episode demonstrates range
CONS
- Early episodes are noticeably weak
- Raunchy animated format no longer feels novel
- Emotional insights are shallower than the creative team's previous work
- Familiar romantic territory rarely explored with fresh perspective
