The girls, ever the voices of reason, also school the boys on the host of services offered at Planned Parenthood, which the always misguided Jay derides as an “abortion factory.” After Missy rebuts that characterization by mentioning the cancer screenings Planned Parenthood offers its low-income clients, Coach Steve’s confusion serves as an entry point into the premise of the sketch that takes up much of the episode: “I don’t understand,” he says. “I hope you at least wore a condom,” Jessi notes, beginning an exchange in which the teens warn their adult coach about the pitfalls of unprotected sex. Titled “The Planned Parenthood Show,” the episode begins with Coach Steve (also Kroll) telling the students, in extremely colorful language, that he’s now qualified to teach them sex education because he recently lost his virginity. WE FUX WITH SAFE SEX, reads the sign outside Bridgeton Middle School at the start of the second season’s fifth episode.
As they grapple with a new, nearly incapacitating sense of puberty-related shame, the teens also find they have some helpful tools at their disposal. As their bodies continue to shift, the eighth-graders Nick (Kroll), Andrew (John Mulaney), Missy (Jenny Slate), Jessi (Jessi Klein), and Jay (Jason Mantzoukas) gain some measure of clarity about what their corporeal changes mean for how they relate to one another-and about the major decisions they’ll need to make as a result.
But the second season, out last Friday, brings with it a set of slightly more grown-up concerns. In Season 1, Big Mouth’s bumbling young protagonists stumbled through the awkward changes of their early teen years with crude, cringeworthy humor. It’s a putrid circus of fluttering stomachs, tonsil hockey, and masturbation. Created by Nick Kroll, Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin, and Andrew Goldberg, the show has never shied away from the grotesque banalities of adolescence.
BIG MOUTH S2 E8 SERIES
The animated Netflix series Big Mouth is a raucous, delightfully vulgar exploration of puberty.