If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you mixed a dash of “The Office,” a sprinkle of “Scavengers Reign,” and a generous dose of Big Pharma paranoia, you’d probably end up somewhere near “Common Side Effects.” It’s a wild, genre-tilting ride, and the folks behind the wheel? That’d be Joe Bennett and Steve Hely, a creative duo with serious comedy and sci-fi cred. Let’s pull back the curtain (or lab door) and see how these two cooked up one of the freshest, weirdest shows Adult Swim has dropped in ages.
Bandera Beginnings: Where Bennett Met Hely
So, the year was 2019. Mike Judge and Greg Daniels—yes, those guys—had just started Bandera Entertainment. Someone in the cosmos decided Joe Bennett and Steve Hely should sit down together and, well, try weird stuff. Bennett had already impressed the weird animation crowd with “Fish” and, of course, co-created “Scavengers Reign.” Meanwhile, Hely wrote his way across TV comedy royalty, penning for “The Office,” “American Dad!,” and “30 Rock,” not to mention authoring novels about fame and strange travels.
It wasn’t long before shared obsessions bubbled up during their brainstorms. Think: mushroom lore, old DEA case files, real-life health industry scandals, and an abiding love for the absurd. Their idea machine started humming around one burning question—what would happen if, suddenly, everyone on Earth could get magically cured by a humble fungus? Cue wild thought experiments and, undoubtedly, a corkboard full of red string.
Mushrooms, Millionaires, and the Coen Cousins
Both creators love genre mashups, but the real juice came from dialing in a tone somewhere between “Burn After Reading” and your worst pharmacy hold-music fever dream. They wanted the show to linger somewhere between real dread and laugh-out-loud discomfort. Hely put it best: “We joked we were running a thought experiment—what if penicillin dropped on TikTok? Who gets rich? Who gets ruined?” Not exactly the stuff of bedtime stories, but certainly ripe for satire.
Movies like “Fargo,” with their dark comedy and offbeat criminals, lived on their whiteboards. So did snippets from Adam Curtis documentaries—equal parts bureaucratic black-hole energy and surreal, slow-building anxiety. They wanted viewers to laugh, then immediately clutch their stomachs. If you found yourself giggling and then questioning your life insurance policy, mission accomplished.
But don’t forget the science. Bennett and Hely did deep dives into mycology, with inspiration from psychedelic scholars Terence McKenna and Paul Stamets. The mushroom at the heart of Season 1, the Blue Angel, nods to that “nature is stranger than us all” energy. Frances—half of our grad student hero team—has a dad inspired by real-life ethnobotanist Wade Davis. These roots keep the show fun, but never floaty.
Inside the Writing Room: Daily Doses of Weird
The first season’s writing room? Nothing short of a comedy-security zone. Each morning started with FDA warning letters, read aloud for “tone-setting gallows humor.” It’s a mood-booster—for a very specific kind of writer. Sourcing authentic details, the “Common Side Effects” crew pulled in an ultra-eclectic panel. A retired DEA chemist (whose name won’t hit the credits), a real Pfizer sales rep (NDAs abound), and mycologist Giuliana Furci all helped make those madcap plots land closer to plausible than pure fiction.
To keep things sharp, they set out a few rules. Among the greatest hits:
– Mushrooms beat money.
– Nobody’s the hero.
– Satire wants stakes.
You can feel those in every episode. There’s no Don Draper or Michael Scott here—just normal(ish) people getting yanked headfirst into disaster and conspiracy.
Season 1’s Mad Science: Themes Under the Microscope
What makes “Common Side Effects” pop, though, isn’t just its oddball humor. It’s the big, anxiety-inducing ideas hiding in every corner.
Big Pharma, Big Problems
The villains at GenaPharm could walk straight out of a Senate hearing. Their boardroom speeches even lifted lines from infamous Martin Shkreli depositions, sewn in with sinister flair. And yes, some plot twists mirror cases like Glaxo’s whistle-blower drama and Insys’s fentanyl scandals—because reality’s just that bonkers right now.
Psychedelic Showdowns
The writers didn’t skimp on psychedelic history. Episode 1 even tips its hat to María Sabina and Life magazine’s 1957 psilocybin bombshell, which ended up upending Sabina’s life for real. Hely and Bennett plant little cultural warning flags everywhere—magic mushrooms may heal, but they also stick you deep in someone else’s story.
American Precarity
This show isn’t just pharma. There are little stabs at daily American stress, too. Frances and Marshall, with their grad school debt and desperation, echo every former student facing loan repayment in 2024. Blink and you’ll see jokes about urgent-care chains with actual CVS pricing data. Satire loves a good spreadsheet!
Painting Panic: Animation as Satire
Bennett, obviously, steered the animation from sketch to final cut. He assembled an international super-squad—artists from LA, France, Portugal, Spain, and Mexico, many handpicked from the “Scavengers Reign” ranks.
Why does the show look so different? It’s all in the “petridish pastels.” He wanted grounded, cinematic frames instead of squashy cartoon slapstick. Lighting cues? Actually filmed on his phone in a shed to get the right mood. Characters move at 24 frames per second, so things feel a touch too real, especially when chaos erupts.
Every tentacle, every flicker of frightened eye—nothing floats in a vacuum. Bennett says, “Draw one lie, base ten frames in reality.” That attention to gravity (and grubby detail) turns the weirdest moments believable.
Fans, Critics, and a Healthy Dose of Hype
Reception didn’t just match Adult Swim’s best—it outpaced it. “Common Side Effects” dropped to 100% on Rotten Tomatoes after 26 critic reviews, pulling an 8.7/10 average. IndieWire chimed in, “Office-level cringe meets Annihilation weirdness.” Variety dubbed it the “first prestige stoner noir.” Translation: everybody loves a show that makes you laugh, squirm, and Google “does the FDA really say that?”
Viewers showed up in droves. Debut streams on Max blew past 2023’s “My Adventures with Superman” by 34%. On social, #BlueAngelBloom trended hard, even grabbing a top-five slot on X/Twitter. People want their medicine weird, apparently.
Second Dose? Oh, It’s Coming
Hardly surprising news: as March 2025 wound down, Adult Swim green-lit Season 2. Bennett and Hely crack open the next writers’ room this summer.
And in classic, never-say-too-much style, Bennett teased, “Next batch pushes outside the States—patents don’t stop at borders.” So, maybe new fungi, fresh villains, and global weirdness are on the horizon. Buckle up.
One More Spores for the Road
Can you really bottle up satire, sci-fi, and pharma paranoia in a late-night cartoon? Apparently, you can—and Bennett and Hely managed it with style. Their writing doesn’t just poke the bear; it hands the bear a test tube, a lab coat, and a pile of overdue student loan notices.
Season 1 made sure nobody’s safe—not your favorite pill-pusher, not that grad student next door, not even the mushrooms hiding in the woods. With a second round brewing and the creators already plotting new experiments, “Common Side Effects” feels like the rare TV show that’s not afraid to be smart, weird, and sharply funny. Here’s to more pills, thrills, and accidental fungal revolutions ahead.
