Note: This story contains spoilers from “Big Mouth” Season 8.
When Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett first joined forces to create “Big Mouth,” they knew the Netflix show about puberty was going to get emotional. But none of them expected the series would become educational.
“We really learned along with the show,” Flackett told TheWrap in an interview that included all four creators. Flackett always expected “Big Mouth” would discuss periods, but it wasn’t until the team was working on the Season 1 episode “Girls Are Horny Too” that the potential for the animated comedy really clicked. To prepare for that episode, the writers all read Peggy Orenstein’s book “Girls & Sex.”
“[That episode] put something in focus for me because it was stuff I hadn’t talked about with my own daughter. It was really in talking to her about, ‘Do she and her friends masturbate?’ I realized, ‘Oh, this show is different for me. It’s different for the way we talk about things,’” Flackett said.
Across the Netflix animated comedy’s 81 episodes and eight seasons, each of its creators had a moment they’re especially proud to have created. For Goldberg, it’s the concept of the Shame Wizard, a character voiced by David Thewlis who preys upon people’s deepest insecurities and can only be defeated by vulnerability. For Levin, it’s the head push, the deceptively catchy nickname given to when a man pushes a woman to his crotch in the hopes of a blowjob. The concept first emerged in a Season 1 episode that explored consent. For Kroll, it was Tito the Anxiety Mosquito, a buzzy worrywart voiced by Maria Bamford who felt especially relevant to the comedian when she appeared in Season 4 — an installment that premiered in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and right after the 2020 election.
“I still think about it for myself. I think about anxiety and the tools that we use to get through it, and I now am trying to teach my children about it,” Kroll said. “It isn’t necessarily sex related, but it’s related specifically to teens and also to everyone right now.”
In order to create a show as disturbingly funny and surprisingly informative as this one, the “Big Mouth” creators had to listen to the main message of their own series.
“It’s communication,” Flackett said. “Ultimately, that’s what we always come down on. It’s really better to communicate and really listen.”
“Amongst us, I am oftentimes the most prudish about what I want to show or say,” Kroll explained. “There’s a real back and forth about what is comfortable? What are you showing and why? It doesn’t always have to be like a educational purpose. Is there just a funny purpose?”
A great example of this happened during the making of the Season 2 episode, “What Is It About Boobs?” In the episode, Missy’s mother takes Missy (voiced by Jenny Slate at this point before Ayo Edebiri took over the role) and Jessi (Jessi Klein) to a Korean spa. It’s there, surrounded by nude women of all shapes and sizes that Missy and Jessi slowly start to accept their own bodies.
“There was this ongoing conversation about how much of these girls do we show? We showed the boys topless, and this is not a sexual moment,” Kroll said.
“We did a steam pass. It was hard for me because I felt that there was a certain double standard about boy nudity and girl nudity, but I also know there’s certain things I’m not always going to win on,” Flackett said.
That early story illustrates another element that’s made “Big Mouth” stand out over the years: the creative freedom at Netflix. “We’ve gotten the opportunity to tell our stories our way 99% of the time,” Levin said. “That’s something that was unique to being on Netflix, especially being on Netflix at the time when we started. It was a time when they really wanted to let storytellers tell their stories and lean into risk and all of those things that go with that creative freedom.”
“It could have only been made on Netflix,” Flackett agreed. “We had other people that wanted it, but we really chose correctly.”
Part of that creative freedom involved the decision to end “Big Mouth.” Unlike other adult animated comedies like “The Simpsons” or “Bob’s Burgers,” the four decided early on that it was was vital for their show about puberty to show these characters getting older. “If you’re doing a show about kids growing up and changing, they do have to grow up and change. In a way, that made the ending necessary,” Goldberg said.
Unlike many of the metaphors in “Big Mouth,” the finale’s plot device isn’t spelled out. Initially, “The Great Unknown” feels like just another episode of “Big Mouth” as Missy (Edebiri) navigates hooking up with her new boyfriend and Nick (Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney) hang out. But when the main characters decide to sneak back into their middle school before it’s torn down, the tenor of the episode changes. A white void appears in the distance that slowly grows as the episode continues. After panicking over what that void means, each of the kids eventually come to peace with the plot device, actively choosing to step into the light even though it means they will be erased.
“It’s this very interesting and unique thing: You’re telling the end of a story about these kids whose adulthoods and futures and lives are just beginning. So in a way, the end has to refer to the fact that it’s just the beginning for them,” Goldberg explained.
To figure out how exactly to end “Big Mouth,” Goldberg asked several people involved in production what the show means to them. It’s Levin’s answer — the idea that you’re not alone — that stood out to Goldberg.
“The void in the last episode was combining those two things,” Goldberg said. “They’re going off into this scary place, but they’re going together, at least.”
The finale is also a nod to the animation process itself. As each character approaches the void, they’re stripped of their coloring, finer details and character model until all that’s left is an actual blank page. The team worked closely with “Big Mouth” supervising producer Anthony Lioi to make sure these final moments best captured what it takes to visually create the show.
As emotional as this finale is, it holds extra weight for Kroll and Goldberg as the series’ main characters, Nick and Andrew, were based on the childhood friends’ real-life relationship.
“What was so crazy about the void is it’s so scary. But it’s this weird, meta thing where I know, we know that Andrew and Nick are going to come back together 30 years later to make this show. That’s so gratifying,” Kroll said. “It speaks to the fact that the future is scary and unknown, but what it holds is such beauty.”
“There’s a moment in the finale where Andrew says something like, ‘Friends forever’ to Nick. There is something so sweet to me,” Goldberg said. “Every once in a while you think back on if the two of us could see ourselves now when we were 12 years old, our heads would explode. There’s this really special thing of sitting next to your friend since you were kids and making each other laugh as adults and surrounding yourself with other funny people you love. It was a really special experience.”
All episodes of “Big Mouth” are now streaming on Netflix.
