Common Side Effects

What would it take to heal the world? That’s a hypothetical question we can easily imagine posed in shareholder meetings of Big Pharma companies or within the halls of the Department of Health and Human Services. However that question is answered in those spaces, it probably involves money—how much to charge people who want to get better from whatever ails them, and how much can be made off people’s pain. Common Side Effects takes a look at that reality and recoils in justifiable, understandable shock at how capitalism has hammered thin our sense of basic human decency. The animated series from co-creators Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely and executive producer Mike Judge is as trippy as it is principled, an amalgamation of surreal, vibrant, and unsettling visuals coupled with a genuine interest in what it would take to redefine our concept of “wellness.” Common Side Effects follows mycologist Marshall Cuso (voiced by Dave King) after he discovers a whispered-about mushroom, the Blue Angel, that can cure any disease in the person who ingests it—even bringing them back from the dead. His attempt to provide the mushroom to anyone who needs it attracts the attention of an array of villains from Big Pharma and the U.S. government to even Marshall’s own community of healers and scientists, and through their enmity the series builds a thriller that addresses questions of class and power. For its cogent analysis of how difficult it is to change a status quo that makes more profit off sickness than health, and its astonishing visuals that are like nothing else on TV, Common Side Effects wins a Peabody Award.