Created by Jennifer Flackett, Andrew Goldberg, Nick Kroll, and Mark Levin, the adult animated comedy Mating Season stays very true to its title. There are plenty of smutty jokes, sexual situations, double entendres, and weird kinks on display here. The show's subtitle could be "Sex, Sex, Sex, and Sex." There is monogamy, polygamy, infidelity, orgies, and open relationships. The paint predominantly used to color this canvas seems to have been extracted from the hormones of a horny teen. The humor, though, is not completely juvenile. Sure, there's an "excellent-sexcellent" lazy pun in there somewhere, but the creators can often be inventive. Consider how the show presents the world of dating apps for its animal characters. Instead of downloading an app on your smartphone, you dive into a hole that drops you onto a chair across from your match, wander into a field for a group-sex encounter, or head to a place where you learn about a potential partner by sniffing their piss; if you like what you smell, you piss on their piss. One of the animals here is known as Creepy Dave, and he feeds soup to the panties he buys from a raccoon named Ray (Nick Kroll), who, in turn, keeps them as cherished memories from his one-night stands.
With all its amusing perversity and high degree of interest in orgasms and bodily fluids, Mating Season is not that different from adult animated series on Prime Video like Hazbin Hotel and The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy. What these shows offer is a delightful collection of quirky ornaments—like, in the case of Mating Season, a psychic mouse who may be a scammer; a box labeled Mouseflix in which two mice act out scenes from the show of your choice; and slogans such as "Humans are animals too, stop shitting on their lawns" from animals who are activists. I enjoyed what Mating Season does with Viagra-like pills. They create hilariously awkward scenes between a bear named Josh (Zach Woods) and his parents, who enthusiastically indulge their sex drive. Josh's grumpy father delivers some of the funniest lines in the series. There are other gags involving Ray's mother, Fawn's (June Diane Raphael) relationship with a wolf who pees on everything, and Penelope's (Sabrina Jalees) desperate search for a lesbian partner, undermined by her clumsy social skills. However, the specifics are best left unspoiled, as they are essentially all Mating Season has to offer to its audience.
Strip away the crude jokes, and you're left with stale material. A femme fatale seducing a guy into carrying out a crime? Check. An ex-lover crashing a wedding to confess her love for the boy she still likes? Check. A character with mommy issues starving for his mother's affection while she remains too occupied with her own life? Check. Of course, these situations contain one or two amusing twists, but the overall result is rarely surprising. Whenever any of the four central characters—Ray, Fawn, Josh, and Penelope—find themselves in a stable relationship, you immediately sense that something will eventually disrupt the romance. Simply put, Mating Season uses cartoon characters as a license to recycle old formulas and conventions with generous doses of sex and zaniness. It's certainly not boring—the pace is fast, and the gags, um, keep coming. Still, if I had to sum up Mating Season, I would recall—and repackage—words I once used to describe Kevin: the "themes," the "story," and the "arcs" feel like clotheslines on which the creators hang their jokes in order to make something funny. It's not a bad way to spend your time. Just don't go in expecting greatness. Mating Season might not be memorable, but it's...fine. I guess that makes it worth watching, especially if you're in the mood for a show that wears its "sexually explicit" badge proudly.
Final Score- [6/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times