BEST OF 2018 - BIG MOUTH IS NASTY AND NICE

4.  BIG MOUTH (NETFLIX)

Big Mouth is dirty. Like, really dirty. As in, the filthiest show on TV by a substantial margin. But it is also an object lesson in how dirty does not have to mean heartless.  Big Mouth is also perhaps the most empathetic show on TV.  By externalizing all of the characters’ worst impulses into various monsters and spirits and talking pubes constantly hissing and grunting terrible advice into their ears, it keeps them sympathetic no matter how filthy or selfish their actions become. This year saw the Ghost of Duke Ellington phased out, probably as much because of Jordan Peele’s limited availability as because he turned out to be rather superfluous as a source of bad suggestions with the all the hormone monsters running around.

But in his place, we got the Shame Wizard, which was a perfect addition and counterpoint to the perpetual grunting and shrieking encouragement of the hormone monsters. David Thewlis is the perfect voice for the embodiment of shame and self-doubt, at once oily and horribly, British-ly logical, but also nailing the exasperated and wounded notes when called for. Also perfect: the autographed photo of Septa Unella on the wall of his office in the Department Of Puberty. Less perfect is John Gemberling’s intentionally but utterly insufferable and stunted hormone monster, but even he has his moments.

All these spirits and horny devils on the kids’ shoulders are not just raunchy joke machines, though Lord knows they produce those at a firehouse clip. They also demonstrate a more sophisticated examination of sex in the #MeToo era than you would expect from a joke-a-minute dirty cartoon. That’s an incredibly positive movement, don’t get me wrong, but at its most zealous and clumsiest points it can engender a feeling that sex or desire itself has been criminalized. And what Big Mouth and its monsters say is not just that everyone gets horny, and so anything goes. The characters are always, ultimately, accountable for how they behave, but the monsters literalize the idea that even fundamentally good people are only able to be “good” in constant defiance of their own natures.  It’s a compassionate perspective that goes deeper than boners, as the monsters voice not just the horniness, but all the shame, jealousy, fear, and selfishness the characters have no choice but to feel as they sheepishly shuffle toward adulthood. Because those monsters, even the seemingly-villainous Shame Wizard, are not presented as Bad Guys to be defeated.  They are just facts of life, fellow passengers that may be bad influences, but it's not until the kids act on that advice that any talk of good/bad guys and girls starts entering into it.

But to get back to the filth, whoooo boy is it filthy. Much of it explicitly, but it also constantly proves Patton Oswalt’s point that you can be gross without using swearwords. If I never hear a more disturbing euphemism for sex than “make thick in her warm”, that’s probably for the best.

Watch It For: Maya Rudolph’s incredible cadences as Connie the Hormone Monstress. If the Emmy’s gave awards for single line deliveries, as they should, she would win them all just for how she bounces out the syllables of “bubble bath”. To say nothing of “pharmacy”, which comes out as something like fuh-wyarm-azz-zee