If Netflix stands out for anything, it’s because its series gradually lose audience after each season until the streamer quietly cancels them. This is what happened, for example, to The Witcher or GLOW, and the likely fate of current hits like One Piece. There aren’t many that have lasted beyond five seasons, but there are some, like A Place to Dream, The Upshaws, or The Crown, that have managed to escape that prison by the skin of their teeth. But until now, only the Spanish series Élite, Voltron, and a couple of children’s shows had stood out as the titles that lasted the longest, with eight seasons each. Until now.
The Audience Monster
If someone tells you that in a place so little inclined towards innovation and risk as Netflix we were going to end up with eight seasons (and two of a spin-off) of a sexually explicit animated series for teenagers and adults, filled with songs about taboo topics and with grotesquely ugly designs, you would probably think they are crazy: How can they renew something like this and not series like Mindhunter? And yet, there is Big Mouth to prove that the strange, somehow, always triumphs.
Big Mouth is the series I would have liked to watch as a teenager to understand many, many things about myself and everyone around me: through its 81 episodes, the series has addressed any teenage issue related to sex, from first crushes to involuntary erections. It could be very thorny, but by doing it from the uninhibited perspective of kids aware that they are in a show and accompanied by “hormone monsters” that force them to do all kinds of silly things. And all of this is set to songs with a cast of characters that could resemble, with some distance, that of The Simpsons.
This is not a trivial comparison: after all, both in Big Mouth and The Simpsons there are dozens of secondary characters with a single line who can, at any moment, take center stage during an episode, and neither of the two series is afraid to talk about important topics, no matter how much they may be, at first glance, taboo for a large part of the audience. But of course, instead of a teenager coming out to talk to you about her first menstruation, it’s a big-headed cartoon character who does it while singing a sexually explicit song that ranges from tampons to the genitals themselves. How can you get mad at such shamelessness?
Farewell, big mouth
It may have been a very cheap series, or somehow it resonated with its captive audience, but whatever the case, it has been enough to keep it on Netflix for almost a decade, from 2018 until just a few days ago, on May 23, 2025. And, given what we’ve seen, no one rules out another spin-off like the one they already made, Human Resources, focused on the “monsters” and with a more adult tone and, to put it in some way, emotional to a frankly unusual degree in Big Mouth.
In the end, that is what made this small series so great: never knowing what is going to happen, what limits they will break, how far they can go. Although at first they were transgressive for the themes they addressed, once the audience got used to it, it was time to go further, and that is where Big Mouth, despite its ups and downs, its rises and falls in quality, has hit the nail on the head and has paved the way for the future of Netflix series. If you want something to succeed, don’t think about what the audience wants to see: think about what you would like to see.
Big Mouth has not only set a record for duration on Netflix: it has also shown that some of the public’s accusations about indiscriminate cancellations are not entirely fair. If we were to rely solely on the “Netflix standard,” Big Mouth would never have been approved at all. And yet, there it is, it has grown up alongside us. Because few things please us adults more, let’s not deny it, than a good dirty joke.
