Mating Season on Netflix: The Big Mouth Creators' New Animated Comedy, Cast, and Voice Roster

The team that turned a show about puberty into one of the most beloved adult animated comedies of the last decade is back. Mating Season premiered on Netflix on May 22, 2026, with ten episodes available at launch, and the cast page has already become the most searched detail of the show. Fair enough. The voice roster is enormous, and most of comedy is on it.

Here is the full guide. What Mating Season is, who is in it, the Big Mouth connection, and how to watch.

What Mating Season is

Mating Season is an adult animated comedy series on Netflix, created by the team behind Big Mouth. The show is set in the animal world and is built around love, sex, mating rituals, and the absurdity of how different species find each other. If that sounds like a feature length premise stretched out, it is. The pleasure is in how committed the show is to its world, and how much room the setting gives for absurd comedy that a human centred show could not get away with.

Like Big Mouth before it, the show takes a topic most television treats with embarrassment and turns it into smart, raunchy, deeply silly comedy. The animal framing gives the writers permission to push further than a live action sitcom or even most adult cartoons would, and the show uses every inch of that permission.

The main voice cast

The lead voice cast is anchored by:

• Nick Kroll, the co creator of Big Mouth and one of the busiest voice actors in the animated comedy space.
• June Diane Raphael.
• Zach Woods.
• Sabrina Jalees.

If you have watched Big Mouth, that lineup will feel deeply familiar. Kroll's vocal range and Raphael's comic timing are the kind of foundation an animated comedy is built on, and they anchor the show without overpowering the ensemble.

The guest voice roster

Where Mating Season gets genuinely impressive is the guest cast. The recurring and guest voice list reads like a comprehensive overview of modern American comedy:

Sarah Silverman, Abbi Jacobson, Vanessa Bayer, Aidy Bryant, Jason Alexander, Lena Waithe, Jason Mantzoukas, Carlos Alazraqui, David Duchovny, Beck Bennett, Pam Adlon, Timothy Olyphant, Maria Bamford, Mark Duplass, Ana Gasteyer, Jack McBrayer, Natasha Leggero, Matt Rogers, Lauren Lapkus, Meredith Hagner, Lisa Gilroy, Natalie Morales, Clancy Brown, Drew Tarver, Annaleigh Ashford, Nasim Pedrad, and Andrew Rannells.

That is not a guest list. That is a phone book of the funniest people working. The breadth tells you something about the goodwill Kroll has built across two decades in comedy.

The Big Mouth connection

Mating Season is not a Big Mouth spinoff in the strict sense. There are no shared characters, and the setting is different. But it shares the central instinct: take a subject usually treated with awkwardness and tackle it head on through absurdist animated comedy.

For Big Mouth fans, the new show feels familiar in the way a band's second album from the same producer feels familiar. Different songs, same studio. If you bounced off Big Mouth, the same sensibility may or may not work for you here. If you loved it, Mating Season is the most natural follow up the genre has produced.

Where to watch Mating Season

Mating Season streams exclusively on Netflix. All ten episodes are available now, so you can watch at your own pace. There is no weekly release to wait through.

A single standard Netflix subscription gives you the full series. The episodes are short and dense, which means a full season can comfortably be watched across a weekend.

Should you watch Mating Season?

If you enjoy adult animated comedy, especially the BoJack Horseman, Big Mouth, Human Resources lineage of shows that take their absurd premises seriously, Mating Season is built for you. If you find that style of comedy tiring or off putting, this show will not change your mind. It is doubling down on the formula, not softening it.

The strongest case for trying it is the voice cast. A show with this much comedic firepower under the hood is almost guaranteed to land its biggest jokes, even if the format is not your default.

If you like Mating Season, watch these next

• Big Mouth, the obvious starting point.
• Human Resources, the Big Mouth spinoff that expanded the universe.
• BoJack Horseman, the gold standard for adult animation that takes its absurd premise emotionally seriously.
• Tuca and Bertie, for another wildly creative adult animated comedy with a strong vocal cast.

Nick Kroll's animation empire

To understand Mating Season's place, it helps to understand what Nick Kroll has been quietly building. Over the last decade, Kroll has become one of the most reliable creative forces in American adult animation. The signature project is Big Mouth, the Netflix series co created with Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett, which ran for years as one of the most acclaimed and divisive adult animated shows on television.

Big Mouth produced a direct spinoff, Human Resources, set in the same world but expanded outward to the bureaucratic afterlife of feelings and impulses. The two shows together built a creative universe with its own language and style. Mating Season is the natural next move, a third show from the same creative orbit, with a related sensibility applied to a totally new setting. The pattern is starting to look like a small studio system, the way Mike Judge built one around King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt Head, or how the Adult Swim creators built one around their early hits. Kroll is at the centre of a real movement in the medium.

Why adult animation has had a renaissance

Mating Season arrives in the middle of one of the strongest periods adult animation has ever had. The combination of streaming demand for distinctive original content, lower production costs relative to live action prestige drama, and a generation of viewers who grew up on adult animation and now expect it as part of their viewing diet has produced a deep slate of shows.

BoJack Horseman, Tuca and Bertie, Big Mouth, Human Resources, Inside Job, Disenchantment, The Midnight Gospel, Common Side Effects, and Pantheon are all part of the same broader wave. What they share is a willingness to use animation to tell stories that live action simply cannot, whether that is because of cost, casting reach, or pure visual freedom. Mating Season's animal setting is a direct expression of that freedom, and it is the kind of premise that exists in adult animation because nothing else can support it.

What makes the animal world setting work

The premise of using the animal kingdom as a frame for adult comedy is older than this show. Wildlife documentaries have leaned on it for decades. What Mating Season does is take the documentary instinct, the close attention to mating rituals and species behaviour, and run it through a lens of pure character comedy.

The result is a setting that lets the writers handle material a human centred show could not. Frank conversations about sex become absurd rather than uncomfortable because the characters are talking from inside species specific behaviours rather than human expectations. The animals can be cruel, ridiculous, and tender by turns without ever quite being us. That distance is the show's secret weapon, and it is why the format works as well as it does.

Frequently asked questions about Mating Season

How many episodes is Mating Season?

Season 1 has ten episodes, all available at launch on Netflix.

Is Mating Season for kids?

No. The show is firmly aimed at adults, with frank sexual humour, strong language, and adult themes throughout.

Is Mating Season a Big Mouth spinoff?

Not in the strict character or continuity sense. It is from the same creative team and shares the same sensibility, but it is its own show with its own world.

Who voices the main characters in Mating Season?

Nick Kroll, June Diane Raphael, Zach Woods, and Sabrina Jalees lead the cast, with a guest roster that includes dozens of recognisable comedy names.

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