Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely’s animated series about a mushroom that cures everything is a paranoid thriller with a soft heart. It wanders, and its villains are thinner than its heroes, but it held us for all ten episodes.
Marshall Cuso believes he has found a mushroom that cures everything, and Common Side Effects spends ten episodes of twenty-three minutes asking what the world would do about that. The answer, according to Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, who created it, is panic. A drugs company wants it buried or bottled. The DEA wants Marshall in a cell. Marshall, who is not a practical man, wants to hand it out to anyone who is ill. It is a conspiracy thriller drawn in felt-tip colours, it is funnier than it needs to be, and it is kinder than the genre usually allows. We liked it a good deal, with two reservations we will come to.
The look is the first thing. Vincent Tsui, Sean Buckelew and Camille Bozec direct, and the characters are drawn with heavy outlines, big heads and small, exact gestures: Marshall’s shoulders go up when he lies, Frances holds a coffee cup like a shield. The backgrounds are something else again. Mushrooms grow in close-up with every gill shaded, spores drift across the frame like dust in a projector beam, and the Peruvian hills Marshall has come back from are green to the point of damp. It is animation that wants you to look at a thing for longer than a joke requires, and we did.
Dave King voices Marshall as a man who is right about one enormous thing and wrong about almost everything else, and he never asks for sympathy. Emily Pendergast gives Frances the tired reasonableness of someone who has spent years being the sensible one and is beginning to wonder why. The pair who steal it, though, are the agents. Martha Kelly plays Harrington in a voice so flat you could level a table with it, and Joseph Lee Anderson’s Copano bounces off it, eager and wounded, like a younger brother who keeps asking to drive. Their scenes in the car are the best comedy in the series, and the writers give them more inner life than most live-action police shows manage.
Then there is what happens when someone takes the mushroom. The show stops. The lines loosen, the colours run, and the person is shown their own life from an angle they have not had before, in a passage that can last a minute or two without a word of dialogue. Nicolas Snyder scores these moments with slow, humming synths that sit under the pictures rather than on top of them. The first time it happened we went quiet, and we stayed quiet for a while after the credits. It moved us more than we expected, and what did it was simple: a face, held, changing its mind.
The reservations. Mike Judge voices Rick Kruger, the man in charge at Reutical, and he is funny, but the corporate side of the story is drawn with a thicker pen than the rest. Kruger and the men around him are venal in the way cartoon executives always are, and the series never finds a reason for them to be anything else. And the middle stretch wanders. Nine writers are credited, and you can feel the writers enjoying their own detours; more than one episode steps sideways from the plot into a minor character and comes back with less than it left with. Tony Christopherson cuts briskly inside scenes, but the season as a whole could have been eight episodes without losing anything we would miss.
Bennett’s last series, Scavengers Reign, was a cold and lovely thing about people stranded on a planet that wanted to digest them. This is warmer, and it is better company. It belongs to a small group of adult animated series that take their own plots seriously and still remember to be funny, and it does something few of them bother with: it is hopeful, and it earns that by showing people being decent at some cost to themselves. Most critics have been warm about it, and we have little to add beyond the caveats above.
Watch it two episodes at a time, in the evening, and resist looking anything up between them. It is a show about a secret, and it is better if you let it keep a few.
