Coming of Age in the End of the World: Big Mouth Season 4
Coming of age stories are some of the most popular, enduring, and accessible fictions in pop culture. They can comprise gorgeous films like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood or Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird to gross-out fare like Superbad or Sex Drive or Blockers to more supernatural stuff like It or Stranger Things or Super Dark Times to the fact that half of all YA novels starting with Twilight could be classified as ‘coming of age’ in some way or another; and that’s only stuff that started in the last 15 years or so. I’m sure I missed other important examples. Coming of age stories are everywhere and have been so for decades if not centuries. It’s a universal form of storytelling because every adult was a child once, and those unrequited longings and confusing desires and harsh life lessons from childhood never fully leave you. They sit within you, waiting to be recalled by memory, or nostalgia, or despair, or all three at once.
This is a truth for which Nick Kroll’s Netflix series, Big Mouth, has shown an exquisite understanding since it began in 2017. While never showing the slightest fear of the innate grossness of the human body or kids going through puberty, the series has developed a surprising emotional depth for its characters throughout its run (Jay and Lola are great examples of this character-work, as is Jessi’s family and entire storyline). It also serves as one of the most open-minded and educational forums on sexuality in all of American pop culture, with songs explaining the spectrum of sexuality to entire episodes explaining contraceptives and the many uses of Planned Parenthood.
Plus, it’s hilarious. I want to make that clear as well, in case it sounded like I was describing an after-school special or one of those awful and awkward films they put on in public middle school sex-ed. Coach Steve alone provides more laughs than half of the middling animated sitcoms around today (looking at you Bless the Harts).
Big Mouth is also (in case you hadn’t guessed already) an incredible example of modern coming-of-age television. In fact, I believe the show is at the forefront of a noticeable retuning of the coming-of-age story. There are very few shows currently on air (or streaming services) as dedicated to empathetically portraying the precious painfulness of adolescence as Big Mouth. From Jessi beginning to understand her body and hormones while dealing with the fallout of her parent’s divorce, to Andrew overcoming a porn addiction and an entanglement with toxic masculinity, to Missy discovering confidence and interest in her racial identity, to Matthew’s growing compassion and coming out to his parents; this is a show that takes every part of puberty and growing up seriously. And it does this for everyone, including people who have traditionally been ignored in coming of age stories before. All while still being very funny.
That widening of perspective, an acceptance that every kind of person goes through their own shitty puberty in their own shitty way (a kind of universality achieved through extreme specification), is also one of a few different ways it distinguishes its new take on coming-of-age stories from the centuries-long tradition that came before. Because more than most genres, the coming-of-age story must adapt to the times. A western is antiquated by design, science fiction reflects present fears but also the future. Coming-of-age, however, depicts children living now (or at least in the recent past), and therefore must show an awareness of how kids and young adults are living today and how they think about the world. It is through this; through Big Mouth’s dedication not only to empathy and the grossness of puberty, but to how it’s young protagonists see the world taking shape around them; that the show truly becomes a coming-of-age show for both the present and the next generation.
It is somewhat disquieting then, that Big Mouth seems so prepared for the end of the world.
A decent amount of proof for this theory comes from the Season 4 episode titled: “Nick Starr”, so be warned minor spoilers for that episode might follow. In the episode, Nick, the main character of the series (voiced by Nick Kroll, who seemingly voices at least a dozen other characters in the show), sees himself thirty years in the future. Formerly Nick Birch, now Nick Starr(!), he is a successful and extraordinarily rich game show host, and obviously lonely and unsatisfied. The plot of the episode centers around his quest to find the perfect plus-one to join him and the other superrich escaping Earth before it collapses due to climate catastrophe. To do this, he reconnects with a lot of the main cast three decades after their adventures in middle school. A lot of this is very funny and insightful in the same way those ‘Simpsons-kids-go-to-the-future‘ episodes of The Simpsons are funny and insightful.
But what I really want to draw your attention to for this episode is the context in which it all takes place. As noted above, the entire plot of this episodes revolves around Nick Starr saving just one of his former friends to live with him in grateful subservience (he’s not a good dude in this future) while leaving everyone else on Earth to die.
More than that, however, is the entire world around them. Any sort of healthcare is out reach for the vast majority of Americans, so they are forced to compete in humiliating fashion on Nick’s game show just to have a chance at cancer treatment, for example. The rich literally live in luxury apartments above the clouds, while everyone else is forced to live below in lawless, dangerous Mad Max-style squalor. Public bathrooms now require payment and ‘piss-tokens’ are now a major form of currency for the lower classes. People are so afraid of intimacy that most are addicted to an artificial orgasm drug named: ‘Oh Yeah’. Global warming has run so rampant that most kids born then have never seen the sky and the world is about to literally explode due to climate catastrophe. Toilet people are yanking on people’s pubes!
All of that sounds more like a self-serious dystopian fiction than one episode in a Netflix cartoon about boners. But, when you watch the episode (it’s still very funny, don’t worry), it completely fits within the context of the series. Every single main character of this show was born after 9/11, into a world of ubiquitous internet and social media, with constantly fluctuating and polarizing politics, rapid technology shifts, and the increasingly un-ignorable consequences of major global warming looming nearer and nearer on the horizon. Not to mention this years COVID pandemic, which I’m sure made everyone (but especially the 13-year-olds at the heart of this series) a little more willing to believe in society’s collapse. Over two-thirds of Millenials and younger generations (hi Zoomers!) believe their generation will be worse-off than their parents. And, unfortunately, the economic data might bear that out.
It just makes sense, then, that one of the most important coming-of-age shows for these new generations would reflect that world-view.
You see this world-view all over the show once you know to look for it. From the constant asides to the worsening climate (both before and after the ‘Nick Starr’ episode), to the references to our fucked-up politics and the way it inspires the worst in lonely young people, to the ever-sharp depictions of corporate overreach in everyday life (the Human Resources department where all the Hormone Monsters and everyone else comes from is “Presented by Acura” after all). All of these jokey asides and references are told in a ‘covering-the-terror-through-humor’ tone of voice that, to me, could be the de-facto tone of voice for our current era.
The show also has a militantly educational tone. There are so many things the show teaches you about sexuality and puberty that I wish I had known during my own adolescence, but it’s done in a grimly, defiantly humorous fashion. As if the show knows that the world outside is scary and inhospitable and getting worse, and it’s main job isn’t to make you laugh (though it’s great at that) but to prepare you for the worst of the outside world. This is also a new (and possibly necessary) trend in coming-of-age fiction.
All this was brought into stark relief for me when I watched two other (quite different) coming-of-age tales recently: Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, and Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone. While acknowledging the 19-year gap in their production and taking nothing away from either one (The Queen’s Gambit, in particular, is an incredible and gorgeous television series that I can’t recommend enough to everyone), they are both clearly coming-of-age tales of and for earlier generations. Where the future was always brighter than the past, where the world around wasn’t crumbling but progressing, where even orphan children could make the world accept them through their sheer talent and specialness.
Big Mouth (again, ostensibly a cartoon about boners) is too smart, cynical, and modern for that sort of blind optimism. It understands and acknowledges the darkness of the world that both its audience and its characters inhabit. It refuses to shy away from a young person’s reality (as much as a cartoon can, at least), and instead tries to prepare you for a world that won’t be easy, that may not accept you simply because of who you are. It’s a show that cares enough about it’s audience to tell them the truth and maybe educate and improve them a little. That seems new to me.
And maybe even real-world helpful. In the Season 4 finale, after Nick is shown to have real character growth, his vision of the future changes. It becomes greener, more utopian and less dystopian. Big Mouth remembers that hope exists for the younger generations too, though they will have to work for it, and it tries to prepare its audience for that as well.
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