Joseph Bennett, Steve Hely
Channel 4 (UK); (US)
One of the best shows I watched last year was Scavengers Reign, a lushly animated sci-fi series about an interstellar cargo ship that crashes on a planet full of strange, dangerous life. Sadly, it was cancelled after a single season. So, I was pleased to learn that one of its creators, Joseph Bennett, had partnered with writer Steve Hely on a new animated show called Common Side Effects, all about a Big Pharma conspiracy.
At its heart is oddball naturalist Marshall (voiced by Dave King), who protests at a public meeting of Reutical Pharmaceuticals, a megacorporation that has been dumping medical waste in the Peruvian highlands. After being thrown out, he bumps into his former classmate Frances (Emily Pendergast), the harried assistant of a Reutical executive.
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Unaware of who employs her, Marshall reveals he has made an extraordinary discovery: the Blue Angel mushroom, a hallucinogen with the power to cure every ailment. The US government, insurance agencies and, most of all, Big Pharma don’t want the public to know, Marshall tells her. His paranoia is justified almost immediately, with everyone from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to Reutical trying to track him down.
What’s obvious from the off is that Common Side Effects is a beautifully made show. The animation is breathtaking but frequently ugly and violent. The hallucinations – which take each patient to a mystical realm filled with ghostly babies that explode in pops of colour – are unlike anything I have seen on TV (except perhaps in Scavengers Reign).
Marshall's flawed, fragile world view is still preferable to the unfeeling profit machine at Reutical
What isn’t clear is what the show is trying to say. It condemns the cruelty of the US healthcare system, but it isn’t a polemic. In fact, it is at its best when it’s exploring the lesser hypocrisies of its most sympathetic character. Once Marshall escapes his pursuers for a while, sick and injured people beg for help. He must make decisions he is usually shielded from. Who gets some of his limited supply of mushrooms? Why should one man control how this cure-all reaches the world?
The series doesn’t settle for easy answers or paint Marshall as a wholly benign figure. Further on, we see how corruptible any system of distributing the mushrooms could be under the wrong cultivation. The unwanted side effects of the Blue Angel also begin to complicate matters. Its visions induce epiphanies in some and abject terror in others, especially when they appear long after the first trip.
But Common Side Effects isn’t a smugly centrist lecture on why Marshall and Big Pharma are broadly as bad as each other. Marshall’s flawed, fragile world view is still preferable to the unfeeling profit machine at Reutical. The show wonders again and again: who does such a system work for? Asking is what matters, as we realise the status quo doesn’t have to endure and ossify, even if we don’t yet have an alternative.
These ideas begin to solidify in the ninth instalment – a long time for a show to get its ducks in a row. But there is plenty to entertain us along the meandering way. It can be very funny, particularly when hapless DEA agents Copano and Harrington (Joseph Lee Anderson and Martha Kelly) are on screen.
Eventually, the messier elements of Common Side Effects do coalesce pretty much perfectly into a hopeful, humanistic show about making mistakes and how we go about healing.
Bethan also recommends…
Joseph Bennett, Charles Huettner
Netflix (UK); Max (US)
Shipwrecked on a strange planet, the Demeter 227’s crew must survive. Unusual inhabitants – from fish the crew wear as gas masks to a living skimming stone – make the show an instant classic.
Merlin Sheldrake (Penguin Random House)
Merlin Sheldrake’s best-selling book about the fab world of fungi is a real treat.
Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor at New Scientist. She loves sci-fi, sitcoms and anything spooky. Follow her on X @‌inkerley
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