Netflix’s New 10-Part Animated Epic Is Taking Over Streaming Right Now

Netflix is quietly building a whole second home for animation, and the latest move is a very on-brand one: give the Big Mouth braintrust a new playground and let them get weird. Enter Mating Season, a crude, animal-kingdom relationship comedy that just dropped and is already making noise on the charts.

Where it sits on Netflix right now

Per FlixPatrol, Mating Season is currently holding the number 6 spot on Netflix’s Top 10 TV Shows chart. It’s trailing The Boroughs, Nemesis, and The Roast of Kevin Hart, but it is the top animated title on the service at the moment. It even leapfrogged Devil May Cry, which had a strong start, so that’s not nothing.

The show hit Netflix on May 22, and we still don’t have a full first-week breakdown yet. Early days. If these rankings stick, though, the outlook is pretty good for a show that hasn’t been officially renewed for season 2.

What the show actually is

If Big Mouth was kids vs. puberty, Mating Season is animals vs. relationships. Same DNA, different ecosystem. It comes from the Big Mouth team with Titmouse, the studio behind a ton of sharp, grown-up animation. And yes, the comedy is proudly vulgar.

Big Mouth ran eight seasons and spun off Human Resources, so the bar for this crew is high. This one feels like the next evolution: relationship stories dressed up in fur, scales, and talons.

How it’s playing with critics

Right now, Mating Season is sitting at 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, which earns it a Fresh badge. Not a bad start for a brand-new universe.

That stacked voice cast

• Sarah Silverman
• Abbi Jacobson
• Vanessa Bayer
• Aidy Bryant
• Jason Alexander
• Carlos Alazraqui
• David Duchovny
• Pamela Adlon
• Timothy Olyphant
• Maria Bamford
• Mark Duplass
• Matt Rogers
• Clancy Brown
• Andrew Rannells

The behind-the-scenes wrinkle

Producer Andrew Goldberg told Animation Magazine they actually started building Mating Season while wrapping up Big Mouth, keeping the core crew together — including supervising director Anthony Lioi — and that it began life as a movie before expanding into a series. That tracks once you hear how they’re using animals as relationship metaphors.

"We actually began thinking about this new venture during the final seasons of Big Mouth. It has been so much fun to keep our crew together and work with our favorite collaborators, like our supervising director, Anthony Lioi. Then we realized that there were so many stories to be told in this animal world, so we decided to present it as our next possible series to Netflix. We can tell a story about a wolf who’s moving in with his girlfriend, and it’s about the challenge for a wild animal to be domesticated. So here’s a metaphor about life and about moving into a relationship, and at the same time, it works on an animal level and a human level. We find that very exciting."

That’s a pretty clean mission statement: one foot in rom-com, one paw in nature doc chaos. Netflix has been pushing into both Western animation and anime originals, and this fits right into that lane — recognizable creative team, clear hook, and enough teeth to cut through the feed. No renewal yet, but given where it’s charting right now, I wouldn’t be shocked if this gets another lap.