The Book of Rannells: Big Mouth: Season 4, Episode 1 – “The New Me” (2020)

And here we are at Big Mouth season 4! I just love this filthy, vulnerable, outrageous show. The season looks to be mixing things up further, exploring new territory, and finding ever more apt analogies for the emotions of puberty (minor spoilers for the end of season 3.)

After Nick and Andrew’s big blowup at the end of last season, Nick is looking forward to forgetting those worries for a while at summer camp, but he’s thrown for a loop when Andrew shows up and starts bonding with Seth, Nick’s “camp best friend.” Jessi, also at camp, struggles to relate to the Manhattan girls in her cabin while, back home, Jay and Lola get themselves kicked out of the public pool.

That summary doesn’t do a great job capturing the episode, but it’s a really strong season premiere. Joining the pantheon of puberty creatures are the Anxiety Mosquitoes, a perfect embodiment of that feeling. I don’t know how the show keeps doing it, but between the Hormone Monsters, the Shame Wizard, and the Depression Kitty, they nail it every time. We’re also introduced to a new character named Natalie, a trans girl who’s returning to camp for the first time since transitioning. Her experience at camp is sadly realistic – “The guys are dicks, and the girls are also dicks” (“…But like, somehow more decimating?”) – and there’s a great sequence of her confiding in another character about her gender identity journey.

I can’t believe I didn’t think before about the comedic/story possibilities of putting Jay and Lola in plots together, because it absolutely works. They’re both such over-the-top characters, both really argumentative but kind of obtusely vulnerable at the same time, so they wind up playing really well off of each other. They get most of the laugh-out-loud funny lines in the episode, from Lola not understanding what “bisexual” means for guys (“Is that like when an actor plays twins in a movie?”) to Jay proffering his dad’s “grave-digging” shovels (“Oh yeah, he Breaking Bads people all the time!”) And of course, the Hormone Monsters bring plenty of laughs too. We meet another one of Maury’s dicks (his “notary pubic,” ha!), and there’s a great recurring sight gag of Connie galumphing around in water skis.

Not much Andrew Rannells, which is too bad. Matthew only appears in one scene, lounging by the pool with his boyfriend Aiden. He still manages to toss off a great one-liner about the public pool’s “kitsch value,” which involves a hilarious visual, but the scene quickly shifts focus to Jay and Lola. That said, I do like Aiden’s deadpan line, “Matthew said you kissed him like you were trying to push his tongue out of a window.” (Side note: while checking IMDb to see if Natalie was voiced by a trans actress – she is – I discovered that Aiden is voiced by Zachary Quinto! How did I not realize that? Once I knew, his voice was unmistakable.)