The team behind Big Mouth returns with Mating Season, an all-new adult animated romantic comedy set in the world of forest animals. The series explores themes of love, sex, friendship, and the instinctive need of all animals to find connection and companionship. Ahead of the series premiere, I had the opportunity to speak with Nick Kroll about balancing the raunchy humor with deeper themes of vulnerability, as well as building the animal “society” with Titmouse. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Lauren Ashton: We have themes of sex, dating, and the messiness and challenges that come with that… through the lens of woodland animal creatures. How did you come up with this splendid idea?

Nick Kroll: The show came to be with my partners from Big Mouth, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jen Flackett. And we felt like there was a great opportunity. Whereas Big Mouth covered adolescence and teen stuff, this was an opportunity to tell more adult stories, specifically around dating and falling in love, sex, all that stuff. Putting it in the animal kingdom felt like a really fun, easy way to tell a bunch of really raunchy emotional stories.

LA: Was there ever a moment in the creative process that you wondered if something was really risky, or have y’all always been confident about taking it this far?

NK: You know, we have so many years of experience doing this kind of material with Big Mouth. And so we kind of knew generally where this stuff lives for us. Usually it lives where there’s this big, crazy joke that’s graphic and sexual, whatever. But it’s always underpinned with a genuine sense of emotion and story. But yeah, we’re going to take some swings. And it’s sort of where we’ve landed in the landscape of animation—it’s sort of a place that we’ve carved out, I guess.

LA: I think once you get into it, as viewers, we accept the landscape and the world. But then we kind of start to see that sense of what you’re talking about, that realness underneath. And it’s also really funny!

NK: Yeah, I mean, that’s the goal: make something that’s funny and also emotional. And again, we all watched, like, Friends and How I Met Your Mother and all those kinds of shows. Like, a group of 20-somethings, 30-somethings who are looking for a partner or whatever. And in this case, it’s in the animal kingdom, so mating season was such a fun parallel to play.

LA: When I began watching the show, at first I wondered about the rules of this universe. Because some of them wear clothes and jewelry, and then they go to things like funerals. When you were creating this, how did you come up with the society and the structure of this animal kingdom?

NK: Sure, I mean anyone who has made animation— specifically around animals— knows there’s different ways of approaching it. Like, do they fully live in their own universe where humans don’t exist? Do they live in the forest? What we started to find, especially in character design, was that you really do need to differentiate them with some sort of like worn object. At least the way our characters were designed. Because otherwise, Josh looks like every other bear. Ray the raccoon is sort of hard to differentiate. But as soon as they’re wearing, like, a kerchief or red sneakers, whatever— it helps figure that stuff out. And then we ask, “what the sets are like and how does that all work?” We definitely looked to The Flintstones and shows like that for finding how to create what we can identify as human living habitats integrating in the natural world. Throughout the show, there’s very fun solutions you’ll see that our artists and designers came up with. Like, “what is a martini glass in the animal world?” When you look closely, the ingenuity that has been developed is incredible.

LA: Well, I love that The Flintstones was also an inspiration for the production design.

NK: Yeah, and little Swiss Family Robinson.

LA: We’ve discussed a lot of the humor and the raunchiness, but like you were saying, there is a realness that anchors it underneath, right? When people watch this, is there a deeper theme or heart of the show that you hope will be taken from this on a deeper level?

NK: The show is about this group of four friends, and so I think part of the theme—and it’s not explicit, it was not intentional—but it’s this feeling of navigating falling in love or trying to find your mate, and how it’s your friends who are actually there to be with you through it all. Hopefully, if you’ve got good friends, you know? And then you have your conflicts and issues with them too, because sometimes they start to become the platonic version of the relationship that you’re either looking for or getting out of. So I think that close friendships can help you through all the trials and tribulations of dating and trying to find your partner.

LA: I love that. Friendship is love too!

NK: Yeah, totally.

Mating Season will release on Netflix on May 22nd, 2026.