Common Side Effects “Pilot”/”Lakeshore Limited”
Created and written by Steve Hely (co-created by Joseph Bennett)
Directed by Camille Bozec (“Pilot”) & Sean Buckelew (“Lakeshore Limited”)
Airs Sunday nights on Adult Swim
Common Side Effects, Adult Swim’s ambitious, wonderfully strange new animated series, presents its audience with a simple question: what if one mushroom could cure anything? The answer, as you might expect, is pure chaos: part buddy comedy, part conspiracy thriller, and part psychedelic adventure, Common Side Effects takes what is, on paper, a rather straightforward series, and turns it into exactly the kind of series you’d expect from the team behind Max’s short-lived, woefully underrated Scavengers Reign, a weird, contemplative series about the beauty of nature, the destructive nature of capitalism – and of course, the inept apathy of the state (and its people) in their selfish attempts of self-preservation.
Common Side Effects follows the unexpected reunion of high school labmates Marshall (Dave King) and Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast), when Marshall is thrown out of a corporate event for protesting Reutical, the pharmaceutical company Emily works for (a fact Marshall doesn’t know). After Marshall reveals to Emily he’s discovered a blue mushroom that can cure just about any ailment, the knowledge makes its way up the corporate ladder and to the American government – which, as you might expect, kick off a chain of violent, occasionally hilarious events, as the DEA and Reutical try to chase down Marshall and his world-changing secret.
Through its first two episodes, Common Side Effects feels like a combination of mid-aughts mumblecore comedy and a Coen Brothers film in the vein of Fargo or Burn After Reading; there’s a lot of understated humor, often filtered through the quirks of its characters or the general ineptitude displayed by the apathetic suits running Reutical and the fictional US government, who task Copano and Harrington, a hilarious pair of “competent” DEA agents (voiced by Martha Kelly and Joseph Lee Anderson), with hunting down Marshall as he tries to elude the many parties pursuing him and his secret mushrooms.
The story about government agents chasing down a bohemian who got rich by gaming the scratch off ticket system provides a strong surface tension for Common Side Effects to build out its world with – it also helps to keep the series moving, with a pace and approach to storytelling that reminds me a bit of films like Conspiracy Theory, where existential dangers, only seen by Marshall, lurks around every corner (and even then, Common Side Effects does a great job of forcing its audience to contend with some signs that Marshall may not be the most reliable narrator).
But what’s really exciting is what lies underneath that; there are hints of a deeper series making its way to the forefront of Common Side Effects, in a way that reminds me of Love, Death + Robot‘s best episode “Fish Night”, and a bit of the extremely unappreciated Lodge 49. Perception of events plays a lot into what is happening in these first two episodes (especially with Emily, whose boyfriend spends all of his time with a VR helmet on), and this adds texture to characters like Emily or Capono – or Reutical’s lazy CEO (voiced by none other than executive producer Mike Judge), whose only moments of joy are found when he steals a peek at his phone screen and the bullshit mobile game he’s got perpetually running on there.
All of the characters in the series, despite using investigations, miracles, and existential crises as distractions, are all clearly (and desperately) looking for something to connect to; the blue mushroom, which sends its users into a psychedelic space-time vortex that seems to have them reliving their own spiritual birth, posits that so much of what constitutes life in modern times is so disconnected with nature, we may have completely lost our way as creatures able to survive. And through that, Common Side Effects slowly reveals itself as something a bit deeper and more reflective than what its breakneck-paced first two episodes initially suggest (there’s also visions users have of a weird, unsettlingly unhuman white figure, which I’m sure will only get more twisted as the season continues).
What Common Side Effects presents, and where it connects itself to Scavengers Reign, is its interpretation of the world’s reaction to humanity; that is, the world’s attempts to heal itself and reconcile its relationship with a creature ensuring its own destruction. The mushroom-induced moments suggest a person re-experiencing their initial birth from nature, almost as if Marshall has discovered a medicine not only healing its patients, but attempting to heal the fractured relationship between nature and human that’s become so incredibly disrupted in the past 200 years.
Common Side Effects is also one of the more visually distinguished series of 2025; though its art style is initially off-putting, with its emphasis on looking at oversized heads and tiny mouths from low or wide, offset angles is a bit disconcerting, even if the show’s animation and visual detail is impeccably presented. But as the two episodes continued, the visual style grew on me, particularly as the second episode begins to play around with perspective and lighting, allowing characters to exist almost as if from multiple angles in the same frame.
It will take a bit more than a promising first two episodes to determine if Common Side Effect‘s incredibly strange, almost confrontational presentation will continue to find harmony with both its realistic and surrealistic elements – but with its combination of low key delivery, intricate visual design, and wonderfully prescient critique of American apathy towards their own destruction, it’s certainly one of the first standout series of 2025 (making it definitely one to watch for when March’s Rookie Rankings debut).