Adrienne Matei

The latest season of Netflix’s animated comedy Big Mouth explores the mysterious world of father figures, and emerges with a revelation. The middle schooler Nick’s dad, Elliot Birch, has been harboring a secret: He used to be a fearsome competitor in the macho martial art of “Scottish nipple twisting.” Elliot is a sweetie pie, a family man who takes the concept of being a lover-not-a-fighter to the extreme.

This summer, the “dirtbags” have taken over screens. You know them when you see them. A paragon of the form is Eddie Munson from Stranger Things: Repeating his senior year of high school, Eddie sells weed, leads the Dungeons and Dragons club, and strikes most of the townsfolk as a plausible Satanist. He is alternately goofy and intimidating, with a love of heavy metal and a mullet one imagines smells of stale beer.