Netflix’s ‘Mating Season’ Review: A Raunchy Animated Sitcom That Tries Too Hard and Misses the Mark

Mating Season is a painful example of a raunchy comedy that strains for shock factor but only ever reaches placidity. Coming from the team behind Big Mouth, a show with its detractors but also with a group of undeniably devoted fans, Mating Season looks to continue that strain of simple animation met with a brash and provocative sense of humor.

While it does a decent job of appealing to those with a hankering for gross-out gags, its large-scale jokes and more concentrated set-ups are far less funny than the odd throwaway line. Mating Season is at its best when it’s not trying so hard.

A promising premise squandered

The show’s premise, as much as it’s derived from a pun, is promising on paper. The idea of a show about dating and relationships heightened through the comedic prism of a mating season in a forest is a good one. A litany of live-action sitcoms has found success in the past and present from that very premise. The thing that Mating Season changes is those shows’ attachment to realism, allowing for the comedy to be more surreal.

In the first episode, we meet Josh, a bear waking up from hibernation to find that his partner has moved on with a new paramour. His colorful friend group, including a hypersexual raccoon called Ray, a lesbian fox called Penelope, and Fawn, a mild-mannered deer, all team together to help him move on. Each episode follows a similar pattern: Josh gets sad, a friend tries to help with a ridiculous plan, the plan fails, rinse and repeat.

Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Nick Kroll as Ray, Zach Woods as Josh, Drew Tarver as Zeke, June Diane Raphael as Fawn, and Sabrina Jalees as Penelope in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026

Jokes without depth

Mating Season’s big problem comes from the massive jumps in writing style between the regular sitcom set ups and the attempts at provocative jokes. Most of the dialogue in the show feels like someone wrote an excruciatingly boring episode of How I Met Your Mother without any jokes, remembered that the show is about animals and threw in a bunch of references to their genitalia. It’s a jarring structure that has very little to say about modern dating and little to add in terms of comedy.

Serving up the same conundrums that any show focused on dating will, Mating Season understands that a lot of these issues are evergreen and worth debating. Things like what kind of age gap is appropriate in a relationship, how tricky navigating dating apps can be and finding love within queer communities are topics that have so much unexplored depth, but the show isn’t interested in mining them. The focus of Mating Season is clearly on comedy over commentary, but good comedy is often found within good commentary. Here, the philosophy is jokes over depth, instead of depth through jokes. This creates a disconnect between the show’s premise and its humour, which isn’t that strong anyway.

Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) June Diane Raphael as Fawn, Sabrina Jalees as Penelope, Zach Woods as Josh, and Nick Kroll as Ray in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026

A dated formula in a changed world

In order for provocative work to be effective, it has to have a sense of novelty. When shows like Family Guy first aired, they were pushing the limits of what could be broadcast on national television. Even if it wasn’t the best-written show at all times, its goal of being provocative was successful. Mating Season exists in a very different world where we’re over a decade into the streaming era and older ideas of what can and cannot be shown have all but faded away. Trying to pick up on Family Guy’s legacy in this era is difficult, and it’s easy to sympathize with a show attempting to recreate its magic.

However, in 2026, the idea of a 2D adult animated sitcom with crude humor just isn’t interesting, and Mating Season does nothing to subvert audience expectations. We are served exactly what we expect, and good comedy relies on at least a modicum of subversion. We’re expected to find the mere image of animals having sex to be funny, or the descriptions of Ray’s many fetishes. None of this stuff is novel, and it all feels a bit lazy.

Where it works

The more effortless and funny comedy comes in the form of throwaway lines that are far more subtle and don’t feel like the show begging to be laughed at. Some of these are then undercut by a far more ham-fisted gag, but the majority stand alone as great bits, especially in comparison to the show’s bigger set-piece gags.

Verdict

Mating Season has no ambition beyond staying the course of the adult animated sitcom. It has a conservative approach to its art style, which looks exactly how you’d picture it in your head, and its humor, which is also exactly how you’d picture it in your head. Sometimes, a show can confidently retread the steps of others in a way that’s entertaining, but we’re so past that point with the animated sitcom that the same old tricks don’t work anymore. Mating Season finds itself at the end of this formula’s life cycle.