Adult Swim’s ‘Common Side Effects’ Is the Right Healthcare Conspiracy Comedy Thriller at the Right Time

By chance, a man finds a plant that was previously only the stuff of legends. He discovers that it has nearly supernatural powers to heal most ailments and injuries — even to revive the dead. Is his first instinct to share his findings with recognized scientific bodies? Definitely not: he’s pretty sure his once-in-a-lifetime find will mark him for assassination by Big Pharma, health insurance companies or the government — and probably all three conspiring together against cures that threaten their dominance. Can you even imagine living in such a world?

Adult Swim’s new animated series Common Side Effects has sci-fi elements, but otherwise seems to take place in a perfectly recognizable America, where pharmaceutical companies prioritize profits over social responsibility or care for its patients, and intractable student debt keeps desperate employees trapped in jobs for immoral employers. Basically, it’s come along just in time for the “Free Luigi” moment. 

Common Side Effects, which premieres its first two episodes on Adult Swim late Sunday night, is about Marshall (voice of Dave King). An expert in quassinoid extraction, Marshall figured out how to read lottery scratch-off tickets’ barcodes to find winners. The $11 million he won is presumably what permitted him to take a mushroom foraging trip to Peru, where he happens to find a blue mushroom with an eerie glow. Soon, Marshall is being attacked by commandos, with an unexpected benefit: When they fatally shoot his pilot, causing a plane crash, Marshall is on the verge of dying himself when he takes a dose of the mysterious mushroom and resurrects himself, entirely unharmed. 

Terrifying though this experience is, it doesn’t deter Marshall from pursuing his research on the blue angel mushroom. He even goes to a meeting for Reutical Pharmaceutical shareholders to confront CEO Rick Kruger (Mike Judge) about runoff from its facilities threatening nearby fungal communities. As Marshall is being hauled off by security guards, a woman in the wings recognizes him. She turns out to be Frances (Emily Pendergast) — now Rick’s personal assistant, formerly a high school friend of Marshall’s. When they reconnect — Frances quickly lying about her employment with the company that just threw him out of a hotel ballroom — he relies on their former friendship to tell her about the mushroom, and what he’s been dealing with since he found it, presumably aware that he’s still being surveilled by off-the-books agents working for shady figures protecting governmental and business interests, though the goons are soon joined by on-the-books DEA agents Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) and Harrington (Martha Kelly). 

Can Marshall trust Frances? How many factions will separately join the hunt for Marshall and the mushrooms? And could Marshall’s discovery help Frances’ mother Sonia (Lin Shaye), living with catatonic dementia? The show was co-created by Joe Bennett (Scavengers Reign) and Steve Hely (30 Rock, Veep), with Greg Daniels and Mike Judge (King of the Hill among its executive producers.

Around this time last year, I reviewed In The Know, another animated show Judge EPed and in which he voiced a character. (It has since been canceled after just one season; I imagine my review was just one of many reasons Peacock had not to make more.) Immediately, Common Side Effects asserts a stark contrast to its cousin In The Know. Its animation style is delicate and inviting, and its visual format is intrinsic to its storytelling. When a character takes a dose of blue angel mushroom, for example, we see a kaleidoscopic representation of how it acts on the body, and also how it connects that body and consciousness to everything in the universe, seen and unseen. 

Okay, that’s an extremely florid way of describing a process that takes just a few seconds of screen time, but that’s part of my point: Even a viewer unfamiliar with hallucinogenic mushroom trips — the square writing this review, say — can appreciate the sensation as it’s animated. The human characters are, generally, less graceful than the ones in Bennett’s Scavengers Reign — somewhere between the grotesques of Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head and the figural style of Fernando Botero, with big heads and tiny hands and feet — perhaps because the character designers spent so much care on Mr. Socrates, the tortoise Marshall brought home from the contaminated site in Peru and low-key the show’s most soulful character.

In short, the show is animated because it’s doing things that would be less artful if it were live-action. 

A show about the sick system we all live in, and about the ways for-profit health-care companies and the corrupt government benefit from a sick, frightened citizenry, could be too earnest or too depressing to engage with. But Common Side Effects is a well-built action comedy that doesn’t skimp on either component. Though Marshall presents as a socially awkward neckbeard who never buttons his shirt, he’s also extraordinarily intelligent and resourceful when it comes to evading the highly trained agents and henchmen pursuing him. 

But even in the middle of telling Frances the harrowing story of the raids he’s survived, he can pause to marvel that another coffee shop patron’s name really is “Geggory”; the first episode closes on him calling Frances, from the alley where he’s hiding, to say some guys are after him, “And I brought my tortoise.” Copano and Harrington do bits running the car radio through their earpieces, Harrington grooving on the street to inaudible music while a baffled hot dog vendor looks on. Back at their office, she asks Copano, “Is celery carrot’s cousin or sibling?” When Marshall heads far south of New York, the local realtor he finds happens to be married to the sheriff, who suspiciously comments that Marshall has a “New York thing” going on. “He’s just asking if you’re Jewish,” the realtor tells him — an attempt at reassurance that doesn’t quite land. 

Frances’ tech bro-y boyfriend Nick (Ben Feldman) has his moments too. Distracted by his VR headset, he’s unconcerned when she heads out long after dark to meet Marshall at Tompkins Square Park, vaguely asking her to get cheese: “The good kind? Has a cow on it.” But hands-down the most darkly funny character is Rick, the checked-out Reutical CEO who makes Frances do all the work that makes up his supposed job. The design of Rick’s character perfectly captures the exact head tilt of an old Gen Xer with a debilitating phone addiction. One of his few happy moments in the first four episodes provided to critics comes when he enhances the goat avatar in his favorite mobile game by getting it a pair of rollerblades. 

Rick mostly just bitches to Frances about the company being doomed (primarily by lawsuits from the families of patients injured by Reutical drugs), oblivious that nothing can happen to affect his material reality, while Frances struggles both to service her student loan debt and to keep her mother in a decent care facility. When Frances has to cut short a work trip to Switzerland to see Sonia, Rick sneers, “Wow, you must really LOVE your MOM.” Also in the mix is a shadowy puppetmaster named Jonas the Wolf (Danny Huston), who has no compunction about ordering the murder of an informant and dumping his body from a moving car, and yet Rick is by far the more hilariously detestable villain.

Amid the rest of the voice talent, King — mostly a writer on shows including The Good Place, Parks and Recreation and Shrill — sometimes feels a little subdued as Marshall. Then again, this is a character who’s used to spending a lot of time alone and was probably befuddled by human interaction even before he was on the run from a conspiracy against a drug so effective it could destabilize world economies and soft-authoritarian governments. Regardless of King’s performance choices, Marshall — who’s standing, mostly alone, against the double-dealing criminals of the health-care industrial complex — is extremely easy to root for. So is the show.