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![Common Side Effects](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cse_interview_main-580x326.jpg)
‘Common Side Effects’ Creators Joe Bennett And Steve Hely On Bringing Their Quirky Thriller To Adult Swim
In May 2024, when it was announced that Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s critically acclaimed, sci-fi animated series Scavenger’s Reign would not be getting a second season from Max, or potential savior Netflix, there were a lot of broken hearts in its ardent fan base. But as is often the case in the animation industry, Bennett was already deep into production of his next original animated series, Common Side Effects, with current collaborator, screenwriter Steve Hely (American Dad!, 30 Rock, Veep).
Initially introduced by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels’ Bandera production company, Bennett and Hely found immediate common interests in modern-day socioeconomic problems and ’90s-era action films. Those ideas bloomed into a dramatic thriller centering on Marshall Cuso (voiced by Dave King), a socially awkward researcher on the hunt in Peru for a rare “blue mushroom” rumored to have incredible restorative properties.
When Marshall travels to a pharmacology conference to confront Rick Kruger (voiced by Mike Judge), the CEO of Reutical Pharmaceutical, Inc., for the company’s toxic runoff in Peru, there’s an unexpected connection with his old high school friend, Frances Applewhite (voiced by Emily Pendergast), who is now Kruger’s assistant. When Marshall confides to Frances that he’s made a huge discovery, both of their lives are put in immediate jeopardy.
Rendered in Bennett’s signature visual style and written with Hely’s wit and character-forward intentionality, Common Side Effects is an adult animated series unlike anything out there right now, including its home network, Adult Swim.
To find out exactly how this show got greenlit and brought to life in exactly the way they intended, Cartoon Brew spoke with Bennett and Hely about bringing something so singular to life. Common Side Effects debuts this Sunday, February 2, at 11:30pm ET/PT on Adult Swim. New episodes air weekly.
Cartoon Brew: When you were brought together by Bandera, did it take a bit to find a commonality in the stories you were interested in telling?
Steve Hely: Right off the bat, we were thinking about the same kinds of stuff: mushrooms, South America, medicine, healthcare. Also, we were referencing the same movies, ’90s action, The Fugitive and stuff. We were very quickly speaking the same language. It’s been a long journey, as that was like 2019 or so. It’s been fun along the way, and the project keeps growing and evolving in a way that feels very positive.
The show is an absorbing thriller which is not something you typically see greenlit for animated series. What was the initial reception from networks to your pitch?
![Joe Bennett](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/joebennett.jpg)
Joe Bennett: I would say that has been such an uphill battle. Just working in the industry of adult animation, it was such a hard thing to try to get done. A lot of [responses] were like, “Well, you should do this in live action. That only makes sense.” From Steve’s world, it’s just the idea of really smart writing where things don’t feel forced, or too on the nose. There’s not this heavy exposition. I feel like you haven’t really seen that too much in animation, or maybe really at all. Common Side Effects, actually, before it was at Adult Swim and Max, we sold it to Amazon. They bought the script, and then when we wrote it, their reaction to the script was like, “This is not funny or interesting.” And I was like, “Well, hold on. It is funny. It’s just that it’s a totally different kind of funny.”
Hely: Scavengers Reign is obviously this fantastical world. But Joe’s done some stuff in animation that’s very much taking place in our world and I thought that was a cool thing to explore. There’s plenty of Common Side Effects that could only be done in animation. There’s all these fantastical hallucinatory sequences. But to make something that you sort of forget is animated seemed like a cool challenge.
How did it eventually find its home at Adult Swim?
Hely: I think it was originally gonna be streaming on Max. But the Warner Bros. empire includes Adult Swim, and somehow it just fit for them. This isn’t necessarily a typical Adult Swim show but they were excited to take something on that’s a little different and weird. It’s cool. I love Adult Swim shows, and I’ve been watching them for a long time. It’s exciting to be part of that legacy, and hopefully it’ll bring us to some fans who are into everything Adult Swim does, as well as people who are like, “There’s this weird show that aspires to be prestige tv.”
![Common Side Effects](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cse_interview_b.jpg)
In developing the look of the series, I could see someone wanting to establish the “blue mushroom” hallucinatory elements of the story first, and others wanting to lock the ensemble cast of characters first. What was your path?
Bennett: It was a bit of an organic process. I talked to Steve about a lot of this stuff. I’d think of a visual, and Steve would help with the description, or vice versa. I think there’s a really nice organic fluidity there that has always worked really well. With this, we wanted to be careful. This is a totally made-up drug and plant, so we wanted to be careful about not doing something that felt too drug cliche, or that sort of thing. But a lot of this is, honestly, me pulling reference from people I see on the street, or characters that I see in a film that’s inspiring.
A good example would be from day one, Steve and I have been talking about the [Marshall] character being based off a real guy, John Laroche in Adaptation. He’s this sort of strange, unhinged guy that is super smart. He’d represent himself in court. He’s kind of dirty, maybe a little smelly. But there’s something really charming and interesting about that guy. It was just implementing a lot of that stuff into these characters. Again, working with a brilliant writer like Steve, this stuff kind of comes together very quickly.
And then Marshall’s relationship with Frances develops into a thing that I don’t even know where it was going to go. It’s so fun to see these characters develop. Then when you’re watching a later episode, I’m hooked on these characters that are totally made up. It’s refreshing.
![Common Side Effects](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cse_interview_a.jpg)
The thriller aspects of the series are very much grounded in real world problems. How did you keep to that throughline?
![Steve Hely](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/stevehely.jpg)
Hely: Every person has felt the experience of going up against the system, whether you’re trying to change your flight, or get your health insurance. Like, you’re just battling this strange, not even a person, but this massive [concept].
Even Rick, the character Mike Judge plays, he’s also caught up in the system. They have pressures on them, and they’re caught and trapped in ways that they’re trying to get out of. There’s not like an evil bad guy who’s planning all this stuff. It’s just a massive shifting, all consuming thing that we’re all caught up in.
We want these characters to be real, and to just think about them like, what would they really do? If the DEA were coming after you, what would really happen? What’s the actual procedure? So, we talked to a former DEA agent. We talked to people who worked in the pharmaceutical business. We talked to mycologists. We talked to legal experts. We talked to a tortoise expert. And that’s how we try to create the story, and that leads to exciting stuff.
![Common Side Effects](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cse_interview_c.jpg)
Bennett: I would just add that even though there’s a ton of characters in this show, at the core of it, it started with Frances and Marshall. What do we want out of that? Things like betrayal and love, how is that going to be injected [into it]? Those are the things that came first, and then it sort of blossomed out into more characters and a bigger story. But at the core of it, it’s always come down to those guys.
The episodes are full of these quirks and oddities attached to the characters that make them memorable, like the car jams that DEA Agents Copano (voiced by Joseph Lee Anderson) and Harrington (voiced by Martha Kelly) break into. Or, the nerdisms of Frances’ boyfriend. Were those additions or scripted inclusions?
Hely: A lot of that was coming from the animation. There’s so much of that that’s just nobody even saying a word. It just looks cool. It’s Joe’s visual eye, or the timing of the animation. Everybody that’s working on the show, the way these guys at their studio have this pipeline that’s full of brilliant animators at every stage, so it just gets more and more interesting as it’s coming along.
With the actors, several times we would have more than one actor in the booth at the same time. We would record their little laughs, or the weird little chat that they would make before they even knew we were recording. Let’s make it sound real and vivid, and the accidents will be as good as the stuff we scripted.
![Common Side Effects](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cse_interview_d.jpg)
Who were the primary animation studios working on Common Side Effects?
Bennett: Green Street Pictures, which is out in Pasadena. It’s a studio made by myself and three other partners. We work with a lot of international artists. We work with a partner studio in Argentina, Le Cube. They’re amazing.
It was such a fun experience and a cool, hybrid setup. A lot of the people coming into this project worked on Scavengers, so it was nice. They kind of knew what they were getting into, but it felt almost like a new challenge. Our supervising director, Benjy Brooke, is a really amazing, smart guy. He was so good about really setting up the guardrails and us building out guides. A good example that is absolutely granular is that there’s a whole part of our guidebook where we don’t want characters to stand in classic poses. So it’s thinking about it more like, what are more naturalistic poses and postures that make sense? Or, thinking about the way a character talks and the cadence that they’re speaking in. Some people maybe don’t say a line perfectly, that there’s a little bit of mistakes sprinkled in there. We were really trying to embrace that as much as possible. Like Steve was saying, all across the board, feeling grounded. And if you have that, then when you have these big portal experiences, you could feel that contrast.
When it came to assigning artists to sequences, or different elements of the show like the blue mushroom sequences, or the action sequences, how did you go about that?
Bennett: With all of the people that you’re working with, you’re going to find out what their forte is, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. One person can be really good with designs and helping with creating the shapes for the portal world. But this person might actually be really good with animating how they bounce. Finding the blends and that sort of thing is really fun. I know Benjy and I really like to figure that stuff out together. You want to build the super team for each section. We were also very fortunate with these artists, who are so unbelievably talented, that they can switch a lot of the times and go from one role to another easily. And that was just so beneficial and so nice. My original sketches are always so rough and so hard to understand, and then they really get so nicely refined over time.
![Common Side Effects](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cse_interview_e.jpg)
Joe, coming out of Scavengers into Common Side Effects, were there things you applied from that series to the making of this series?
Bennett: It was quite different from Scavengers. Just visually, it’s a pretty different looking show. I think that a big part of it was that we just wanted to make this show look like we weren’t taking any shortcuts, and we weren’t trying to just do the cheap and easy way. It’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of drawing. Hopefully, it pays off and people appreciate that. We’re entering a world where AI, and all these things can make the most polished, craziest looking stuff. It’s making me, day-by-day, want to embrace the more hands-on, craft feel.
How have you been pitching your non-animation watching friends to give this show a chance?
Hely: We’re trying to make a show like Succession or Breaking Bad. I don’t put it in the box of cartoons, or animation. This is a cool, interesting, unfolding drama/ thriller/comedy. It’s unique and special, unlike anything else. The quality of what Joe and the team put together is so awesome, and people will like it.
Bennett: As Guillermo del Toro would say, animation is not a genre. It’s a medium.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.