“Common Side Effects: Season 1” Review

In the spirit of Twin Peaks, Common Side Effects is an adult animated series that starts with an alluring premise and spins it into realms of the surreal, philosophical, and absurd. It’d be easy to see this idea of immortality from one perspective, but creators Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely never make their show that easy to figure out. They also know how to find just the right moments of comedy, treating a story of conspiracy with earnestness amid its odd designs of characters with big heads and small hands. But even with those cartoony designs, a sense of realism is ground into the dialogue and locations, making this whole season feel like an entrancing fever dream.

At the heart of this narrative is a mysterious blue mushroom that can heal any injury, cure any disease, and bring a dead being back from the void. The mushroom was first discovered by Marshall Cuso (Dave King), a fungi expert on the run from dangerous forces that want him and his mushroom discovery destroyed. The only person Marshall feels he might be able to trust is Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast), an old friend with an ailing mother who could really use that healing fungi. Marshall doesn’t know that Frances works for the failing pharmaceutical company Reutical, led by the weary and distracted Rick Kruger (Mike Judge).

While the two struggle to figure out what to do with the magic mushroom, they’ll have to contend with the conspiring forces of the quirky FBI agents Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) & Harrington (Martha Kelly), the greedy Swiss financier Jonas Backstein (Danny Huston), and the corrupted Deputy National Security Director, Cecily (Sydney Poitier). That’s to say nothing of the mushrooms’ weird effects on people, granting them strange visions of little, white figures that transform into a mess of shapes and foreboding visions.

What makes Common Side Effects stick out from the competition is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous and mysterious, bleeding the two elements into a fine cocktail of conspiracy. This is a show where exposition can be interrupted by commenting on odd names or spoken while grooving to music. Characters might look like silly caricatures with exaggerated proportions, but they’re given an air of humanity while still being relatively smart in most actions. Marshall becomes an easily likable character for his wisdom of medicine and biology, while Frances has a slower journey of realizing that capitalism can’t correctly handle this life-saving discovery. Every character grows in this show, where even the reliable dry humor of Copano and Harrington is challenged when they realize how corrupt the system that they serve is. This duo was instantly loveable for the introduction being their car dance to Harry Belafonte’s “Jump In The Line” and made all the more enduring by the climactic challenge of their friendship.

A show like this has an unpredictable allure, which is more compelling for how it keeps leading towards chaotic and unexpected areas. A life-saving mushroom has endless possibilities and concerns, expressed by nearly every character who wants to either preserve, purchase, or plunder its presence. The ultimate effects of the strange visions are also never given any concrete reasoning for their highlights, presented as more of a mystery daring to be solved than an easy metaphorical puzzle-box to solve. That air of fantasy amid such grounded characters and realistic backgrounds presents an animated series that feels more alive than most live-action shows.

Realism has rarely been a problem for the productions of executive producers Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, having proved an effortless sense of reality in King of the Hill. This show, produced by Judge and Daniels’s Bandera Entertainment, has that exact tone and nature akin to King of the Hill, beyond Judge’s performances, which have a lingering of Hank Hill. The world created here feels so real that it becomes easy to grow invested in its plight and complexity, curious to see what wild places it delves into the supernatural for moments of surreality.

Common Side Effects is unlike any conspiracy thriller on television, let alone adult animation. Loaded with little moments of charm and grit amid complex contemplations on healthcare and life itself, this isn’t exactly an easy show to explain without stitching together tonal descriptors of off-beat or cerebral. It might be best described as the perfect animated drama to ever grace Adult Swim, blended with grander philosophical ideas that are never reduced to punchlines or subversion. This is the type of smart, thoughtful, and weirdly humanistic animation that we need more of in this world, and for that, Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely have created something that can only be described as a trailblazer of the medium.