Picture Credit: Getty Images / Netflix
The team behind Big Mouth reunite for Mating Season. Much of the former’s crew worked on the latter animated series recently released by creators Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg, and Nick Kroll. Once again, the Big Mouth creators score big laughs, but this time they’re following animal life.
Whether it’s a bear, a fox, a raccoon, or deer, they’re all just looking for love in Mating Season. The series is a half-hour comedy about relationships, taking cues from rom-com classics and some reality dating shows. Even at the series’ crudest or silliest, the creators and writers behind Mating Season make relatable stories about blossoming or plummeting love. Recently, Flackett, Goldberg, and Levin told us about telling real love stories with their animated critters.
In Mating Season, now you’re exploring the romantic neurosis people often experience in their 20s. When you’re all in the Mating Season writers room, how much real-life life experiences are discussed?
Jennifer Flackett: That’s everything. That’s how we got our writers for Big Mouth and those were all of our stories about puberty and these were all of our stories about our early dating lives, here about how we met our person.
Andrew Goldberg: In the writer’s room at Big Mouth, it was a lot of us sharing the most humiliating things that happened to us as children. Now it’s us sharing the most humiliating things that happened to us as adults.
Mark Levin: We want a place where everybody can tell these horror stories about themselves and turn them into comedy. Hopefully, it’s cathartic for the writers and the audience, but it’s most important for the writers. It is nice to be able to look back at these things that were really cringey or horrible at the time and be able to have perspective on them. Writing gives us the chance to do that.
Andrew Goldberg: When you take something that was traumatic and you make it funny, you suddenly make it a lot less scary. It is therapeutic.
Mark Levin: And then on an audience level, people hear these stories and they’re like, “Oh, that happened to me too, or I’m not so alone.” Or that thing that I thought was just about me is actually universal. When we’re able to do that, whether it’s in this show or other shows, it’s kind of the brass ring that you’re going for.
Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Laurie Magers as Forager #1, June Diane Raphael as Fawn, Aidy Bryant as Nancy, Sabrina Jalees as Penelope, Lena Waithe as Alex, and Aidy Bryant as Lesbian Friend in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026
Were there any great romcoms or romances that were discussed as influences?
Jennifer Flackett: Obviously, When Harry Met Sally, always.
Andrew Goldberg: My Best Friend’s Wedding was a real inspiration to us in the finale.
Jennifer Flackett: We love all those tropes. Every romantic comedy is someone running to tell somebody something and they need to get this. So we play with all of those tropes. Even in the first episode when he gets up and makes that heartfelt plea to Olivia where it’s like, “I love the way you blah, blah, blah.” It’s a romcom speech. I think about it directly from When Harry Met Sally, but I’m sure it existed before that. But you’re just always looking to put a little spin on all of those things.
Mark Levin: It’s the times when the romantic comedy that we’re telling intersects with the animal facts or animal world in a really fun way. When something works as an animal story and as a human story, that’s where the magic of Mating Season happens.
Andrew Goldberg: As much as we’re inspired by romcom movies, there’s a whole genre of TV romcom shows that were inspiring: Friends or How I Met Your Mother or Sex and the City.
Mark Levin: New Girl.
Andrew Goldberg: And then there’s also a whole genre of these dating shows. Love is Blind and Love Island as also part of our inspiration.
Mark and Jennifer, speaking as a fan of the rom-com you wrote, Wimbledon, it’s clear you both have an affinity for the genre. You’re not making fun of the classic rom-com staples in Mating Season.
Jennifer Flackett: Well, we love them. We do. We’re not making fun of them. I think we’re just using them to help us tell our stories, but we love that. We found this in Big Mouth too. We like big emotions. If we don’t have an emotional way into the story, it never usually stays in. These characters – they really matter to us. We really want them to find love.
Similar to Big Mouth, you get these seemingly standalone episodes of Mating Season, but clearly, you’re telling a full story arc. How do you pull that off?
Andrew Goldberg: We kind of fly by the seat of our pants with that respect. We come into the season with ideas, but we always discover things along the way. Our finale in season one brings back a lot of the things that we learned throughout the season, but that wasn’t our plan going in. It was just something that inspired us as we were going as well, just seeing our characters interact with other characters and being like, “Oh, wow, there’s something special here we should return to it.”
Jennifer Flackett: What has juice? You kind of see that in Big Mouth, where we often would have a theme for the seasons. We would have anxiety or shame. Here, we put up on the board really pretty early: it’s a romantic comedy. It was to remind ourselves that when we stray too far from that, that means we’re not caring so much when we don’t treat these animals like their quest for love is really important.
How many animals are there on the show? How big is the animal kingdom on this show?
Mark Levin: That’s funny. We have not counted. We don’t know for sure. We try to be generally true to the region, which is the American Northeast, and have a forest that would largely be populated by animals that would exist there, but it’s an
Jennifer Flackett: Expanding group. There’s an anteater in there, and it turns out, they’re not there. That’s on us, but we’re still okay.
Mark Levin: But it’s a giant universe. There’s a lot more animals than there are people.
Andrew Goldberg: Yeah. If they ever got together, we’d be in trouble.
Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Toks Olagundoye as Claudia and Zach Woods as Josh in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026
We spoke with Titmouse co-founder Chris Prynoski earlier this year. He says whenever the company starts a project, he’ll ask the makers of it a series of questions. What questions did Chris and Titmouse have about animating Mating Season?
Mark Levin: We met Chris and Titmouse 10 years ago when we started Big Mouth. At the time we had independently, even before that, to pitch the show, made a little pencil test, which is like a two-minute animation test. It really showed the characters and the tone of the comedy, and had the voices of Nick Kroll, Jenny Slate, Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, and Jordan Peele.
So we had the advantage of being able to really show our vision without having to describe it in great detail because we had that tool and we actually took that tool around to all the different animation houses in town. And then we were asking them a lot of questions about how they can help us accomplish that vision. What we saw at Titmouse was an adventurous spirit.
Jennifer Flackett: Artist-driven.
Mark Levin: Artist-driven place. Also, a place that was hungry and wanted to graduate from a little more fringy animation and get into what we call Fox Sunday Night or Primetime Animation. Titmouse hadn’t really been in that arena yet, but now they’re firmly there. But then when we started talking about Mating Season, we actually did the same thing independently and we already knew we were going to collaborate with Titmouse, but we made a pencil test again to test the voices of our characters.
Jennifer Flackett: And how do they move?
Mark Levin: These pencil tests are a giant part of our process.
By the way, great casting with Zach Woods as a bear. Andrew, was that a pretty quick decision?
Andrew Goldberg: Yeah. All four of the main parts were really written with the actors in mind. We had worked with all of them before, all of them as actors on Big Mouth, some of them also as writers. We created Penelope for Sabrina [Jalees] and Josh for Zach and Fawn for June Diane Raphael. And then for Nick, it’s been his lifelong dream to play a raccoon.
Jennifer Flackett: He really loves raccoons.
Andrew Goldberg: Yeah, there’s a real connection to that critter.
Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Lauren Lapkus as Harvest and Nick Kroll as Ray in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026
You also got a lot of love songs, both old classics and original songs for the series. How wild did your music supervisor go, searching for the right romantic needle drops?
Mark Levin: It’s always an evolution and it’s a little bit show specific, but Amanda Krieg Thomas has been our music supervisor since the fourth season of Big Mouth, and she’s a giant part of our team.
Jennifer Flackett: As is Abe.
Mark Levin: Abe Forman-Greenwald is our dialogue editor who takes a particular interest in helping select a lot of the music that goes into the show along with the music supervisor.
Andrew Goldberg: And then Mark Rivers, our composer. A master of all genres. When you can really point him toward a genre, he has an incredible ear to see what is a romantic comedy score.
Mark Levin: But he also wanted to strip down a little bit from what we’re doing on previous shows and focus on an acoustic guitar driven score for this show. Mark Rivers thought that would evoke the feel of the campfire and the forest a little bit more, to invite the audience in through that instrument.
Jennifer Flackett: We really kept everybody together. Almost all our artists, all of our production team, we all came together. Even though we were making the first season, it felt like the 10th season in certain respects because we’d all been working together for so long.
