"PEN15" gets close, but this one really captures the icky weirdness of the child-to-adult transformation. When it comes to exploring and satirizing the horrors of puberty, "Big Mouth" has no parallel with regard to its sheer in-your-face grossness, played up to maximize the audience's discomfort and thereby placing us, the viewers, in the same arena of squeamishness as its characters. Until Season 4, neither did the creators of "Big Mouth." Not really. "Your parents," Lena concludes, "haven't let you be Black." "What's the difference?" Missy asks in reply. "Do you prefer sweet potato pie or pumpkin pie?" Quinta queries. "Have you ever been forced to watch a bootleg of a Tyler Perry play?" Lena says. "Have you ever had your hair braided?" Quinta asks. But in the second episode of the recently premiered fourth season (written by Kelly Galuska) the series finally confronts its hesitancy to have conversations about race by way of a summertime trip to Atlanta, where Missy spends time with her cousins Lena (voiced by Lena Waithe) and Quinta (Quinta Brunson).Īnd while Lena and Quinta are kind to Missy, they let her know in no uncertain terms that her Black father and Jewish mother are depriving her of fully connecting to her cultural identity by avoiding talking about race and racism. Totally normal girl stuff.įor most of its run "Big Mouth" treats Missy like every other middle schooler, highlighting her extreme awkwardness as opposed to the fact that she's a biracial eighth grader in predominantly white school. She also has an active fantasy live in which she travels in the universe in a space ship with Nathan Fillion as her guide and consort. She's has two guys fighting over her and doesn't know what to make of that. Let me phrase that another way – I wasn't. Putting it simply, if you were a Black girl who was really into comic books, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" and spent more time with her nose in high fantasy novels than thumbing through the pages of "Seventeen," you were not getting a whole lot of attention at school dances. Many more people overlook the fact that geekdom isn't an all-inclusive world, even now.īut it really, really wasn't back in the day, when I was the approximate age of "Big Mouth" character Missy Foreman-Greenwald. Geek culture's coolness is only a very recent phenomenon.
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