The thrust of Common Side Effects, Adult Swim’s new animated show, is a big one: What if you found a mushroom that would cure anything — any ailment, any illness, any wound? Marshall (Dave King) has done exactly that, and he has found that the result is a lot of people think he’s crazy, and he’s got them after them. You know them: in this case, a cadre of shadowy figures, DEA agents, and various thugs sent by Big Pharma. It’s a tale that goes as big as the animated world of Common Side Effects will let it. Which is exactly why co-creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely wanted the story to stay grounded and natural — right down to the motion of their eyes.
“You’re talking to [somebody] — a lot of times their pupils are always scanning your face, just always moving around and scanning,” Bennett says. “That just feels like a little quirky thing that we don’t really think about much.”
But Common Side Effects’ characters were considered on that level. Especially as the show balances the absurdity of being in a ’90s-style conspiracy thriller from all angles. “We’ve always talked about Coen brothers movies being a really nice sort of North Star for us,” Bennett says. “You can have these really hilarious moments and then all of a sudden somebody gets shot in the face.”
To anchor that, Bennett — who also worked on Scavengers Reign — wanted the characters to look like people. (He laughs and acknowledges that these character designs are a little “more on the bobblehead side” of the spectrum of characters he creates.) And to help build out the world, Hely and Bennett pulled from all over — we’re talking all over.
“Stuff we’ve been reading, stuff we’ve experienced, people we knew, people we’ve heard of, documentaries, life experiences,” Hely told Polygon. “The Insider, Erin Brockovich, Grisham movies, The X Files — all of these things that were important to us growing up. Conspiracy theories! Weird characters from Reddit, weird characters from real life.
“We talked to people in the pharma business. We talked to a mycologist. We talked to a tortoise biologist. We talked to people that have worked in different parts of the corporate world. We talked to a law professor who knows a lot about how drugs become legal or illegal.”
All of that could certainly bog down any writing process. But for Bennett and Hely, it actually felt freeing. After all, like with any good conspiracy, Common Side Effects has a lot of moving parts. As people run and chase each other all over the world, there is a lot to consider even just on a pure timeline basis, let alone factoring in plot and pacing needs. To really lose themselves in the thriller, the research helped.
“It seemed often like the more it was true to what would really happen, it would reveal exciting things that could go into the show,” Hely said. “It’s funny, the word ‘cartoony’ is sort of a negative word — we’re trying to make a show as real as Succession or Breaking Bad. To do that in animation, if we pull that off, that right there will make the show funny.”
The first two episodes of Common Side Effects are now streaming on Max. New episodes drop every Sunday night on Adult Swim at 11:30 p.m. EST and on Max the day after.
