Adult Swim
When one starts watching Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects, it’s easy to feel confused about exactly what it is. Is it a comedy? A thriller? A drama? A sci-fi epic? A bizarre drug trip?
After a while, though, it becomes clear that the answer to all those questions is the same one. Just as it is for the question of whether this is one of the best new shows of the year:
Damn right it is.
The animated series, which debuted back in February, was created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, and produced by King of the Hill co-creators Greg Daniels and Mike Judge, the latter of whom plays a few supporting characters. It tells the story of Marshall (Dave King), a fungus expert who discovers a rare mushroom that, when consumed, will cure any ailment, from dementia to seemingly mortal injuries. He unfortunately finds himself using it a lot for the latter purpose, since the pharmaceutical industry — and the many government agencies in bed with it — would very much prefer that the world not learn about a natural phenomenon that would put every drug company out of business.
Marshall reaches out to his high school lab partner/crush Frances (Emily Pendergast), not realizing that she’s the executive assistant to Rick (Judge), the CEO of the drug company that seems to be endangering these miracle mushrooms. As various forces conspire for and against Marshall, we meet a pair of DEA agents, Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) and Harrington (Martha Kelly), who are best friends with similarly quirky, low-key tastes; evil Swiss financier Jonas (Danny Huston), who will stop at nothing to eradicate the mushrooms; Hildy (Sue Rose), Marshall’s mentor, whose goals for the mushroom are far less altruistic than his; Amelia (Shannon Woodward), a mycologist whom Harrington lists in her phone as “Amelia Mushrooms” after the DEA hires her to help with this case; Jimmer (Judge) and Rusty (Hely), a pair of backwoods North Carolinians who prove surprisingly helpful to Marshall; Marshall’s half-brother Zane (Alan Resnick), who illegally imports exotic animals, and thus has access to material that can help Marshall.
Zane is usually high on psychedelics whenever Marshall visits him, and Common Side Effects both looks and feels like something Zane might see only when he’s tripping. The characters generally have stubby limbs, oversized heads, and eyes that are either very small or very large, but always with giant, solid black irises in the middle. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen in a while to evoking the design aesthetic of legendary cartoonist Bill Plympton, though the way the animation moves is very different from his work. The aesthetic is simultaneously off-putting and endearing, as if this is obviously not what people should look like, but in a way that suggests how hard it is for them to navigate this strange and broken world in which we all find ourselves. The mushroom’s healing properties also lead to hallucinations, often involving mysterious white imps, who should be adorable and instead come across as menacing little ghouls.
The humor’s often dry, particularly in the hugely charming rapport between the DEA agents, but Bennett, Hely, and company are also smart about when and how much to deploy jokes. Rick is often presented as too insulated by his wealth and power to know how to do basic things, like getting the TV in his hotel room to stop showing the channel about the hotel. But he also seems to understand other people’s basic emotional needs when they’re shoved right in front of his face, and when Frances demonstrates what the mushroom is capable of, he seems genuinely excited by the possibility that it can help lots of people — even if he also thinks his company can patent it and make a fortune off of helping said people. It’s a vicious satire of late-stage capitalism that, despite its medium, doesn’t treat the most powerful members of that system — or even the weakest ones like Rusty — as total cartoons.
The plot keeps escalating, in a way that occasionally raises questions about how Marshall keeps surviving all the forces arrayed against him, mushroom or no mushroom. Yet by the season finale all the sides of this mess converge in a way that feels satisfying and inevitable, based on all the wild things that have happened to this point. Adult Swim has already ordered another season, and I can’t wait to see what comes next, no matter how much Common Side Effects may occasionally make me wonder if I took the wrong medicine right before watching.
All 10 episodes of Common Side Effects are now streaming on Max.
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