NEtflix’s Big Mouth set out to do a very specific task. An animated comedy featuring teenagers watched by hormone monsters, it planted its flag as a frank exploration of puberty as it is objective; a heavy, horny, non-stop body horror nightmare.
However, over the course of his five seasons, Big Mouth has only slightly taken his eyes off the ball. As the episodes progressed, you noticed that the creators began to lose interest in their human teenage characters as they became more and more enthralled with the flamboyant gruesome monsters, all representing their various adolescent desires and demands. This was reflected in the announcement it received; for the past two years, Maya Rudolph has won Emmys for her portrayal of Connie the Hormone Monstress, a type of horned griffin that – among other things – exists to teach teens how to masturbate.
Which brings us to Human Resources, a new Big Mouth spin-off designed to show what monsters do when kids are not around. Think of it as a workplace comedy or, as one character says before the opening titles of the very first episode, “‘Big Mouth meets The Office’ is how we sold it.”
However, fans of The Office should probably not be too excited by the comparison because, except my memory failed me, no episode of The Office ever revolved around an employee injuring himself in a huge pool of ejaculate. In short, despite the change of location, the indefatigable brutality of Big Mouth remains completely intact. This is a series where a giant spider drops a bowl of hot soup on his cross and shouts, “Oh, my spider dick!” It’s a series where a small army of decomposed penises will have a birthday party. You probably already had a good idea whether you should invest your time in human resources or not, but the last two sentences have probably reinforced it to concrete solution. You are either in, or irreparably out.
Hopefully it is the former though. Well, if you fit past the sex stuff and the thick jokes and difficulties that seem to have been accidentally thrown into the script, Human Resources gets pretty sweet and – very occasionally – pretty deep.
Now that the overwhelming majority of the character monsters are designed to reflect various aspects of the human personality, they are all very clearly defined. There are creatures that represent love, shame, ambition, logic and addiction. Each of them is a bit one-dimensional, but this is conscious, and the joy of the show comes from watching the work: finding a human being and arguing with each other about how they should behave. In that sense, you should try to think of it as a riff on Pixar’s Inside Out, though a riff on Inside Out that you would deliberately go out of your way to avoid in a pub.
It’s also worth mentioning the cast, which is just phenomenal: Nick Kroll, Maya Rudolph, Randall Park, Ali Wong and David Thewlis are joined by Jermaine Clement, Maria Bamford, Thandiwe Newton, Jean Smart, Henry Winkler and – slightly unbelievably – Lady Helen Mirren as Shame Wizard, Rita St Swithens. Apparently, even the smallest walk-on roll has become a figure of immense talent. It is remarkable.
That said, I’m not sure if human resources would – or should – replace the Big Mouth in the hearts of its viewers. The broader mandate means that the new broadcast can splash around in a wider range of human experience, and become our episodes about marriages and births and parents. But this means that it also lacks the laser focus of its parenting show. Big Mouth was able to remove 51 episodes from the horrors of puberty, but Human Resources is dealing with the birth in a fast-paced scene. As such, it all feels a bit more surface level and much less rich.
Nevertheless, there is still a lot to enjoy about the new show. Admittedly, that pleasure depends on the amount of satisfaction you are able to achieve by hearing Thandiwe Newton refer to herself as a “hairy insatiable jizz monster”. If that is a lot though, the human resources are there for you to take.
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