Long before Big Mouth season 3 will ever see the light of day, Netflix recently surprised fans with a new Valentine’s Day special that’s set to debut this Friday. Titled “My Furry Valentine,” the two-part special bridges the second and third seasons of the popular and critically acclaimed animated series. Co-creator Andrew Goldberg hopped on the phone with Metro to talk about the special, but not before laughing at a family-friendly Times Square ad for the decidedly adult show.
“We knew they were doing that, but it was still so funny to see,” he says. “I grew up in the New York suburbs in the 1990s, and the idea that something is too dirty for Times Square is kind of strange. When I grew up, Times Square was the place to go for smut.”
Andrew Goldberg talks Big Mouth season 3
All jokes aside Goldberg, who co-created Big Mouth with comedian, actor and childhood friend Nick Kroll, credits the fans of the series for partially inspiring the Valentine’s Day special.
“It was our idea, partly because when season 1 came out, we found that two weeks later everyone online was asking, ‘When is season 2?'” he says. “We thought, ‘Maybe we can give the fans something in between seasons, especially seasons 2 and 3, to tide them over and keep them engaged. At least until season 3 comes out.”
As for Valentine’s Day itself, Goldberg explains that the writing staff chose it “very quickly” because all of the show’s major themes and most popular topics are tied to it. That, and pretty much everyone involved could recall their own horrifying Valentine’s Day-specific experiences from their adolescence.
“As soon as we started talking about, everybody in our writers’ room had some traumatic memory from being a kid on Valentine’s Day,” he says. “Everyone’s stories felt very palpable, in a way. These memories really stuck with people for decades, so it seemed to make a lot of sense for us to do it.”
Which is why, as viewers may notice during the credits of “My Furry Valentine” on Friday, practically everyone in the show’s creative team is involved. Unlike most episodes, which are developed by the team but ultimately written by one or two writers, the Big Mouth Valentine’s Day special required the efforts of just about everybody.
“We made this at the beginning of season 3,” Goldberg explains. “We gathered all the writers a month early and wrote this all together. This was really the first episode we’d ever done like this, where we broke the story together and, literally with a sharpie, divided up the outline. Different groups of us took sections, broke off to write them, then came back together to combine them before doing a rewrite.”
Celebrate Valentine’s Day before Big Mouth season 3
The team then took a break for a few weeks while Kroll was shooting a movie, but when that was done, they reunited to begin breaking stories for Big Mouth season 3.
“We’re deep into animation right now,” Goldberg says of season 3. “We do some rewriting at the art and animation phase, but the show is mostly pretty set. We’re still fixing things that don’t quite work or changing things that don’t quite look right, but we’re into it. When we first started, we were constantly worrying about whether we would have enough stories to tell. But so far, rather than scraping for ideas, we’re finding that we can’t do everything we want to do in a season. Some things we have to save for a season 4 for beyond.”
Aside from announcing Big Mouth season 3 last November, Netflix has not indicated yet when the show’s next installment will premiere. Since season 1 debuted in September 2017 and season 2 in October 2018, it stands to reason that Big Mouth season 3 will most likely begin streaming much later this year.
When does Big Mouth season 3 premiere?
Big Mouth: My Furry Valentine streams Friday, Feb. 8 on Netflix. Big Mouth season 3 premieres later this year.
