“Common Side Effects” says a lot about what ails us, from its pharmaceutical executive’s blasé attitude about his customers’ health to the devouring greed of those who would rather kill for money than aid the sick. Around every corner its hero Marshall sees his demise, all because he’s found the cure to the world’s diseases in a small cap and stem known as the Blue Angel.
All this started with its creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely vibing about ‘shrooms. Hely, who previously worked on “Veep” and “American Dad,” wrote a book about his travels through South America that touched on his experimentation with ayahuasca.
Bennett’s short-lived “Scavengers Reign” won passionate critical acclaim by realizing an alien planet bursting with life and mortal peril, a fertile setting for a visionary animator.
When they came up with “Common Side Effects,” Bennett recalled in a recent interview, he was thinking about their prominence in alternative medicine, where proponents tout the efficacy of Lion’s mane and Reishi mushrooms. “I was just like, ‘Why isn’t this more of a thing?’” Bennett said. “And why do these guys feel like they’re sort of pariahs within the science community?”
Given the conspiracy tones of its little guy versus Big Pharma Goliath plot, one might commend Bennett and Hely for cooking up “Common Side Effects” in time to connect to our collective rage at our broken healthcare system run by shameless oligarchs.
The reality is that it’s been in the works for years. Adult Swim greenlit it in June 2023, with “King of the Hill” creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels signed on as executive producers. Of course, our profit-driven healthcare system has been failing us for decades.
“We don’t have any particular preachy agenda,” Hely said. “We’re just trying to explore characters caught up in a system that often pushes us in strange directions where it’s like, how did we end up doing this? Why are there shares of a pharmaceutical company being swapped on the stock exchange and people are speculating on it? I mean, all kinds of paradoxes emerge out of seemingly normal human systems that trap us.”
If “Common Side Effects” were to be adapted into a live action story, nobody will be dream casting Dave Franco as Marshall Cuso, voiced by Dave King. Marshall is a schlubby nature-lover who discovers an exceedingly rare mushroom in a hidden Peruvian valley that can eliminate any disease. He’s also a disheveled neckbeard who’s easily dismissed as a crackpot, and is therefore expendable.
Common Side Effects (Adult Swim/Warner Bros.)
When he’s not trying to shame Reutical and its CEO Rick Kruger (executive producer Mike Judge) for their poor environmental practices, he’s eluding mercenaries contracted to kill him before he can make his discovery public and put them out of business. The DEA also assigns Agents Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) and Harrington (Martha Kelly) to watch him, although they soon question why the government wants this potbellied plant nerd so badly.
Like “Scavengers Reign,” “Common Side Effects” explores the weave of our relationship with nature and what can happen if we abuse that connection. In Bennett’s other show, the unfamiliar planet’s ecosystem fights back. Here, he explained, he and Hely wanted to lean into the folly of human incompetence, “pitting the natural world versus the synthetic and our attempts to sort of reproduce something and ultimately not really ever getting it right.”
However, Marshall is smarter than everyone expects him to be, on an intellectual par with the real figures he’s partly based on, like famed mycologist Paul Stamets – especially his bucket hat, which he and Marshall have in common — and John Laroche, the horticulturalist who Susan Orlean profiled in her 1998 bestseller “The Orchid Thief.”
Common Side Effects (Adult Swim/Warner Bros.)
His weakness might be in trusting his one-time high school lab partner Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast) with his secret when they cross paths after a Reutical shareholders meeting. Frances, you see, is employed by the company and angling for a promotion. But Marshall’s discovery is bigger than something so petty. And for Bennett and Hely, its effects grant them a way to animate surreal beauty into a meaningful thriller. In addition to dreaming up lush psychedelic sequences, “there are some scenes of showing sort of processes inside the body and stuff like that in a way that would be difficult to do with live action,” Hely said.
Mushrooms are also having a moment. Sure, fungi caused the apocalypse depicted in HBO’s blockbuster “The Last of Us” (which is returning for a second season in April) but it’s also a marquee star of the wellness industry. Microdosing psilocybin has been mainstreamed, and psychedelics have been incorporated into spa retreats.
Bennett saw opportunities beyond the artistic adventure of a story about magical medicinal fungi. “Scavengers Reign” tapped into a heartbeat and a consciousness on a planet where all life is interconnected, he said, “and that certainly came from thinking about just how mycelium works, and studies showing how trees can talk to each other.”
On a more mundane level, he and Hely wanted to speak to a frustration nearly every American has experienced.
Seven or eight years ago, Bennett said, he watched his mother wage battle with providers to make sure his grandfather had the care he needed while he was in hospice. “It was just such a backward, messed up thing, and it was exhausting too, for my mom,” he remembered.
So what if there were a cure that legitimately eliminated our reliance on big pharma?
Hely likes to think “Common Side Effects” offers a hopeful vision. “In the world, as we talked about, there’s stress and everybody’s out there dealing with their health problems and their family’s health problems and the bureaucracy,” he said. “If we just made something that’s a little fun and a bit of an escape, that’s cool. But you know, if we get people thinking about the systems that we’re trapped in and the ways that we get caught up and pushed in directions that may not be true to our hearts, that’s cool too.”
“Common Side Effects” premieres at 11:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 2 on Adult Swim.
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