When Adult Swim announced a new series executive produced by “King of the Hill” creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, fans would be forgiven for expecting a sharp yet sweet comedy. That is not what “Common Side Effects” is. Instead what premiered is difficult to explain, a series that serves as a tense conspiracy thriller as much as it is a bone dry comedy about ordinary people sucked into a saga that’s grander than they ever imagined.
In fact, “Common Side Effects” is a show so unique and unexpected, it confused the series’ original home at Amazon, which purchased the show in 2019. “We turned some scripts in, and they didn’t quite get it,” series co-creator Steve Hely told TheWrap.
It wasn’t until fellow co-creator Joseph Bennett (“Scavengers Reign”) made a short animation of the project that the duo was able to find other buyers. They eventually settled on Warner Bros. Discovery, the company behind both Max and Adult Swim.
“They bought into the idea of this big, wild, serialized story that was going to span a lot of time and have a lot of characters and make you pay attention,” Hely said. “Sometimes it was going to be funny, sometimes it was going to be intense, sometimes it was going to be dramatic. It’s something totally new that you hadn’t seen before, which is was what we were going for.”
“Common Side Effects” revolves around Marshall (voiced by Dave King), a pacifist who discovers a mushroom able to cure even the deadliest injuries and illnesses. Together with his high school friend Frances (Emily Pendergast), the two try to use the fungi to develop a new drug capable of eliminating illness altogether. But as they desperately try to make humanity better, they find themselves on the other side of a conspiracy involving the government and Reutical Pharmaceuticals, Inc., one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, both of which are hellbent on suppressing their efforts.
Development for the Adult Swim series started when Hely and Bennett were brought together by Judge and Daniels under their production company, Bandera Entertainment.
“We met up and immediately started speaking the same language about mushrooms, conspiracies, thrillers, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, South America and talking about some of the same movie references,” Hely explained. “We got going on this thought experiment of what if there were a medicine that could cure almost anything? What would happen? Who would try to stop that? How would it disrupt the world?”
Despite the fact the series is, at its core, a conspiracy thriller, “Common Side Effects” does have its funny moments. The most common note the duo gave their actors was to do less acting.
“We always wanted it to be funny without being jokey,” Hely, who has previously worked on “30 Rock,” “American Dad!” and “The Office,” said. The two were inspired by the work of the Coen brothers and often kept the mics running before and after recording sessions to capture the mundane chatter of people living in the real world.
“[Martha Kelly] was definitely a person that we would want to do that to,” Bennett said of the actor behind DEA agent Harrington. “There’s so much rich material that we can inject into this character. She did tell us that she always wanted to play a detective, so we were happy to make that real for her.”
Because it was so vital to capture and incorporate these natural-feeling segues, the team first asked its actors to come into the recording studio and “really nail down the voice,” Bennett said. At times, this process would pivot the direction of the character altogether and ask the animators to capture “those little subtle expressions, those little idiosyncrasies” of these voice actors.
Though the earthbound “Common Side Effects” may seem more grounded than Bennett’s other show, he does not see it that way. “It didn’t feel like that much of a departure to me, because we’re talking about mushrooms and the natural world and just nature in general. That was a big theme in ‘Scavengers,’” Bennett said, noting that he never considered “Scavengers Reign” to be sci-fi. “It was more just the natural world and our relationship with it, whether we abuse it or not.”
“Scavengers Reign” lasted one season on Max before it was cancelled. Though Bennett doesn’t have any news to share about its potential future, he’s grateful his passion project ever saw the light of day.
“It never really got the marketing push that it should have, so it basically
was thrown out into the world on its own and really has been growing from that,” Bennett said. “I remain hopeful. I feel like, by the day, it’s gaining a bigger and bigger audience.”
As for this new project, both Hely and Bennett have a plan to expand this story past its first 10 episodes. “We don’t have it mapped out on a season-by-season level, but we have quite a bit of more exploring to do with these characters and these stories. Hopefully, we’ll get to do it for a while,” Hely said.
“When I get positive comments from [‘Scavengers Reign’], it’s like, the most heartfelt, sweet comments. It just feels real,” Bennett said. “That has been such a nice feeling, I can ride that forever. And I feel like ‘Common Side Effects’ is going to have the same impact.”
New episodes of “Common Side Effects” premiere on Adult Swim Sundays at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT on Adult Swim and is available to stream on Max.
