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Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects Is a Surprisingly Great SF Series
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Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects Is a Surprisingly Great SF Series
There’s so much more to this thoughtful, affecting show than you might expect.
By Dan Persons
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Published on December 3, 2025
Credit: Cartoon Network
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Credit: Cartoon Network
Head’s-up: We’re going to be dealing with spoilers right from the get-go, for anyone who has not seen the full first season.
The most shocking thing about the Adult Swim animated series Common Side Effects (2025) is not its reenactment of a bloody, disastrous FBI raid. It’s not that numerous people die on-screen in horribly graphic ways. It’s not its exposé of the greed of Big Pharma, or the violence of the prison system, or the corruption of modern law enforcement, or its on-screen depiction of turtle defecation. No, what shocks me about Common Side Effects is that it uses Enya’s Caribbean Blue unironically.
That may not sound so disconcerting. Trust me, given the venue, it is. Adult Swim is the evening component of The Cartoon Network, and an outlet best known for cynicism and snark, where a sketch on Robot Chicken might feature Dean Koontz feebly insisting his Zune is almost as good as Stephen King’s iPod, or where an entire series, Rick and Morty, is predicated on the thesis of “People suck, and so do you, and so do we.” Enya, with her sweet, ethereal vocals and her lilting, synthesized scores would seem not to be a major inspiration for this lot, but a prime target. (Indeed, over at MTV during South Park’s first season, there was a sequence where Stan’s grandfather trapped the boy in a room and, to give him a taste of the day-to-day torment of being old and enfeebled, forced him to listen to a pretty accurate send-up of Enya’s Orinoco Flow.)
And yet, here Caribbean Blue is, in the final minutes of Common Side Effects’ season closer, backing up a montage showing where the show’s vast roster of characters have arrived in their journeys, for good or ill. And I think I know why. According to Enya herself—who credits poet, lyricist, and producer Roma Ryan as an important collaborator—the point of the song is to express how the power of imagination can alter one’s world…and yet within that sunny sentiment rests this enigmatic lyric:
If every man says all he can,If every man is true.Do I believe the sky above,Is Caribbean blue?
Well, that’s kinda dark, innit? I mean, every man is not true, never has been, never will be. If you want to strip the gender issue out of it (something I’m not sure should be done), not even every person is true. (As for any particular Persons, well, I ain’t no saint. It’s a fair cop.) Within all of the song’s light and whimsy, a doubt rests. The creators themselves are at best ambivalent about their own philosophy.
Perhaps not by coincidence, Common Side Effects is just a tad ambivalent about the outlet delivering it. It’s a show about an amateur but dedicated mycologist, Marshall Cuso (voiced by Dave King, who also serves as a writer on the show), his former high school lab partner, Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast), and their adventures with the Blue Angel, a Peruvian mushroom that cures all ills (literally: wounds heal, bones mend, the near-dead rise). As befits an Adult Swim series, each episode offers up plenty of edgy humor, but beyond delivering laughs, the show clearly has another mission—a more affecting one.
Earlier in that final episode, we see Frances driving along a deserted highway in the car she stole from her boss, the pharmaceutical exec Rick Kruger (Mike Judge, who’s also an executive producer and here is doing a kind-of de-twanged Hank Hill). Guilt-ridden from having betrayed the altruistic Marshall by bringing the Blue Angel to Rick, she has fled a strategic business lunch between her boss and a financier in order to race toward a long-delayed reunion with her friend. As she drives, she listens to a series of voicemails Rick has left her. They go from befuddled—“If you have a chance, if you could just check in, or something”—to annoyed—“Look, I have lunch with J.P. Morgan today and they want to see Frances”—to threatening—“I don’t want to get lawyers involved.” But after that progression, Rick leaves a one final, telling message, “So just so you know, this is not about money. This is about me being worried about you.”
And here’s the thing: For all that Rick is the feckless, shallow CEO of the wonderfully named Reutical Pharmaceuticals—constantly in fear for his job; ever intent on the quest for profit; and annoyingly dependent on Frances to perform such mundane tasks as programming a hotel TV—when he says this, you believe him. Across the course of the series, it becomes clear there’s more to the relationship between Frances and Rick than just employee and employer. He obviously sees himself as the woman’s mentor, maybe shading into an almost paternal role, and one can sense that Frances has a kind of grudging affection for the man. While Judge’s flat intonations play to Rick’s cynicism and world-weariness, that inherent Hank Hill-ness also adds a warmth that lets you know the character is more than the stereotypical money-grubber.
In a broader way, Common Side Effects makes a cottage industry out of breaking stereotypes. A family of upstate New York rednecks (is that a thing?) is gun-happy and eager to cash in on the mushroom, but have their own sense of integrity and clearly love each other. A pair of DEA agents are dedicated to their mission, but also are endearingly goofy, bopping to whatever song pops up on the radio. Even the production of Common Side Effects breaks stereotype, jettisoning the flat, sketchy look of many Adult Swim series and taking hefty inspiration from Japanese anime. Produced by the Buenos Aires animation studio Le Cube under supervising director Benjy Brooke, the action sequences, especially that calamitous FBI raid, are impressive, while the character designs break away from established norms, featuring compact bodies supporting large, round heads with faces centered in the middle (think of all the satirical distortions of certain political figures, but without the malice). The look overall is a notable departure from co-creator Joseph Bennett’s previous works, the ecological Rube Goldberg SF short Scavengers (2016) and its series follow-up Scavengers Reign (2023). Those titles owed a lot to the style of the adult anthology comic Heavy Metal, particularly the work of artist Moebius. Here, perhaps reflecting the live-action background of co-creator Steve Hely—among his credits are Veep and The Office—the emphasis is not on rendering a fantastic world with the clean, elemental lines of print media, but on giving animated characters space to live, breathe, and act.
Which they do, to powerful effect. For a series that’s both a send-up of paranoid thrillers and a pretty accomplished paranoid thriller in its own right, what gives the show its power is the credible, relatable portrayal of these characters and their experiences. No rotoscoping appears to have been involved, but through the use of large, expressive eyes and subtle nuances of acting, the characters come off as profoundly, touchingly human. Watch Frances on a phone call with her mother, who has just been roused from her dementia by the Blue Angel, and see if the gradations of emotion that play across her face as Frances realizes what has happened don’t move you. It’s more emotion than one would expect from a show that also indulges in psychedelic interludes where, tiny, stoic, featureless men frolic among abstract shapes.
There’s a good reason why the animators have worked hard to get us involved with the fates of these players. Connection, between us and the characters and between the characters themselves, is a major theme of the series. Bennett clearly has a fascination with the concept of interconnectedness—his Scavengers projects expressed the idea through the symbiotic and parasitic ecology of an alien world, and in Common Side Effects he uses the idea of a mycelial network (thank you, Star Trek: Discovery) to advance an intriguing notion: In addition to mending bones, healing wounds, and vanquishing cancer, the Blue Angel sends its beneficiaries into the realm of those little frolicking dudes, a place Cuso dubs the “Portal,” where one may get a glimpse of one’s true nature, whether one likes it or not. But even after the healing is done, the link to the Portal remains, bleeding into our tangible world and connecting all those who have visited. In her flight from Rick, Frances encounters a Portal being morphing into all the people who matter in her life, while another Portal being (or maybe the same one?) guides Marshall to an eventual reunion with Frances. That sense of becoming aware that we are all one with the universe is something apparently common to those who have taken psilocybin trips. (I wouldn’t know myself, but it’s tempting). It’s clear that as the season closes (season two has happily already been green-lit), a number of those who have benefitted from the Blue Angel are getting networked together in a way they hadn’t expected.
That closing montage, set to Caribbean Blue, carries moments both devastating and ironic. The rednecks mourn the loss of one of their family during the FBI raid. Marshall’s brother uncrates a load of turtles that are crucial to the propagation of the Blue Angel (turns out the secret ingredient is turtle shit). Rick, having been foiled in exploiting the mushroom’s healing properties, settles for marketing it as a super-tasty food additive. And Frances and Marshall sit together, watching the sun set over a desert, as Marshall observes, “Maybe if we do everything right, we can heal the world.”
For an Adult Swim series, that’s an uncommonly hopeful attitude. In reality, there will be no magic mushroom that will cure all the world’s ills. But the metaphor that Common Side Effects offers is a compelling one: That there is more to humanity that connects us than divides us. The creators, through their artistry and empathy, have united us with these characters—I would like to think that they offer up this communion in the hope that we will take the hint, and move forward from there.
I’m not kidding about this: Second only to Severance, Common Side Effects is one the best SF series this year (and it’s been a pretty damn good year). That it’s on a network too frequently dismissed as TV for stoners (and yes, the whole psychedelic aspect plays to that demo) is unfortunate. Look past stereotypes, as the creators have done, and what you find is a top-notch work of imaginative fiction, with excellent production, writing, and performances. Have you checked it out? What do you think? Am I overstating things? We have the comments section below for your thoughts. Be friendly, not cruel in your entries. We’re all in this together.[end-mark]
The post Adult Swim’s <i>Common Side Effects</i> Is a Surprisingly Great SF Series appeared first on Reactor.
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