I feel like Big Mouth could be great if it had a little more structure and adhered to a set of rules for the world.
The idea of the Hormone Monsters, The Shame Wizard, and a couple other aspects are good on their own, but there doesn't seem to be much consistency to how all of these things interact with the real world.
I mean there is potential here for kind of an Inside Out/Monster's Inc style set up where we see the inner workings of how the personifications of concepts like puberty operate.
But that only really works if they are impacting something resembling the real world, so they actually seem special and unique, and it is easier to use these characters to identify with aspects of going through puberty. However, this is a world that has people regularly interacting with ghosts of celebrities, talking ladybugs (among other animals), talking fuck pillows (OK seriously, the fuck?) and other examples of weirdness. So much so that the Hormone Monsters almost seem mundane in this world because the world is pure nonsense anyway.
I mean if the parents found out their kids were talking to these things, would they even bat an eyelash? Did they all have hormone monsters too? Do they remember them? I don't know. I feel like there is room to explore some stuff, but you need structure for that, and this show doesn't have it.
Like I said, it needed some kind of a structure like Inside Out or Monster's Inc, and instead feels like Family Guy's level of randomness, which only undercuts the premise for me.
It would also help if the kids actually felt like real kids, but with adult voices (which I guess they had to do because good luck getting minors to work on something as x-rated as this) and far too extreme personalities, they don't even feel like real teenagers going through puberty most of the time. If anything, they feel like future sex criminals in the making.
deadline.com
