With Warner Bros. owning Adult Swim, it sometimes feels like only a matter of time before the adult-oriented animation channel gets sent to the tax writeoff mines. Which makes its new show Common Side Effects feel all the more refreshing and precious.
Common Side Effects follows Marshall Cuso, an animal-loving mushroom expert who has discovered a blue mushroom that cures everything from common sickness to gunshot wounds. He reveals its existence to high school classmate Frances, whom he doesn’t know works for Reutical Pharmaceuticals as an assistant to its delightfully incompetent CEO Rick (voiced by Mike Judge, so you get to hear Hank Hill call a private jet a “PJ”). Frances offers to get the mushroom for the flailing Reutical, adding her to the list of people trying to hunt Marshall down. This includes two wonderfully deadpan DEA agents, Copano and Harrington, who have maybe the best character introduction ever.
Marshall is a strange character, seeming in some ways like a washed-out hippie and in others like an accomplished scientist. We first meet him having a comment instead of a question at a Reutical shareholder meeting, his shirt hanging open as he drones on about fungus habitats until he’s dragged out. When he runs into Frances, he rants about a shady “them,” the “people who make tons of money just from keeping us sick, from keeping us unwell.” It’s conspiracy theory stuff, but in the show’s world there’s truth to it: different parties go to huge lengths to keep the miracle mushroom from the public for their own gain. There’s something risque in exploring healthcare-related conspiracy theories that turn out to be true these days, but Common Side Effects also takes aim at an industry many people are pretty fed up with.
My favorite part of the show is the way everything is so physical; characters’ bodies are wrinkled and strangely proportioned, all of their features too small for their heads. Rooms are full of detritus, coffee cups and takeout containers and grow lights, and it makes the world feel lived-in. It all feels very real, even with the fantastical element of an immortality-granting mushroom at its center. In many ways it’s a crime thriller, but everything moves so slowly, full of characters prone to small talk, and this languidness brings both a humor and a calm that give it a unique feel.
Common Side Effects’ third episode just aired on Adult Swim and Max, so it’s a good time to get into it if you haven’t checked it out yet. I’m excited to see where its plot goes, but more excited just to spend time in its weird world.
