Big Mouth made a great episode about sexual harassment, “The Head Push,” back in season 1 before the Harvey Weinstein floodgates first opened. This is another really strong episode on the subject that looks at reactions to #MeToo and #TimesUp.
The school’s putting on a musical adaptation of the movie Disclosure. Beyond the general wrongness of middle schoolers performing a show with sexually-explicit content, Jessi and some of the other kids band together to protest the musical’s reductive misogyny and the production’s exclusionary casting practices. However, when Missy is cast as the Demi Moore character in the show, her own Hormone Monstress emerges with a sexually-aggressive appetite. Elsewhere, Coach Steve gets the full Queer Eye treatment from the Fab Five.
We’ll start with Coach Steve first. Not gonna lie, when the trailer for season 3 first popped up on YouTube, I saw the thumbnail of Coach Steve with the animated Jonathan and legit thought it was gonna be Jesus. While I’ve been enjoying Coach Steve’s reduced presence this season, mostly sticking to cameos and quick gags, this is a fun use of him. The Fab Five have their work cut out for them in trying to get him to even understand what’s happening, and the whole side plot offers some good comedy. We’ve got Antoni being abducted by seagulls, Tan’s attempt to give Coach Steve a French tuck ending in disaster, and this too-real line from Bobby: “While you guys were busy cutting Steve’s hair, telling him how he feels, and buying him a shirt, I renovated his entire fucking home.”
All the stuff around the Disclosure musical is really good. The whole idea of making a new musical about an old movie whose ideas about sex/gender don’t hold up reminds me of some of the discussion around Tootsie, although it’s even more blatant here. The director framing the show as a cautionary tale about the “dangerous” world in which poor scapegoated men now find themselves could have been pulled straight from an incel’s Twitter feed, and like we’ve seen in earlier episodes, it’s really insidious when kids absorb these ideas that adults in their lives are selling them.
What’s more, the episode explores sexual harassment both in terms of discourse and actual behavior. I won’t get into the specifics of the latter, but it’s really well-done and offers strong scenes for a character who usually stays firmly in the realm of comedy.
Matthew comes into the story on the protest side of things. While Jessi is against the show’s message and other characters are protesting being cast as racial stereotypes, Matthew turns on the show when he isn’t cast as the male lead despite clearly being the most qualified (when he bursts onto the scene during auditions, Big Mouth continues its tradition of Andrew Rannells being a ludicrously-better singer than every other person in the entire cast.) The “I just don’t see you as a romantic lead” thing is depressingly-familiar, and Rannells discussed it in relation to his own career in his memoir. Matthew’s white-hot fury at being passed up is excellent, as is Maury’s impassioned defense of him: “He has the voice of an angel and the face of a god!!!
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