Algorithms be damned: There is good stuff on TV. Of innovative hits, you have, to name a few, the surreal mystery of Severance and the moral ambiguity of Is it Cake? (What exactly are the ethical implications of a cake that looks like a garbage disposal?)
But shows that explore Big Ideas still tend to be rare. Suppose you want to tell a story about ecosystems, or critique Big Pharma? That heady stuff can risk running an audience off to more mindless programming, like any of the dating shows that play like Hunger Games with poolside lap dances.
One way to tell smart, difficult stories is to sneak them into something unassuming … say, the humble cartoon.
Two of the most ambitious shows of the last few years are not only cartoons, they’re both made by one little bitty studio in Pasadena: Green Street Pictures. Green Street has a lot going for it — brilliant storytellers, incredible artists, a lucky break with COVID. But more than that, the reason these shows are so expansive is: Green Street trusts its audience.
The studio’s newest show is Common Side Effects.
Common Side Effects just ended its first season on Adult Swim. It’s a comedy-thriller about a mushroom that can cure anything, even death.
"We were talking about wellness, medicine, hallucinogens,” says Steve Hely, one of the two creators of the show. “And then we got going on a thought experiment about what would happen if there was a mushroom that was the best medicine in the world, and how would you distribute that? Who would have it, who would try and stop it? Where would that lead?”
A view shows the inside of the writers’ room for the second season of “Common Side Effects.” Credit: Brandon R. Reynolds
Common Side Effects is maybe not the weirdest idea for a show — I mean, there’s a reality show where people make cakes that don’t look like cakes — but it’s pretty weird. It’s a comedy thriller in the vein of Breaking Bad or The Fugitive, in which the protagonist is a mushroom expert who never buttons his shirt and keeps dying. There’s Big Pharma intrigue and DEA operations and shoot-outs, but no obvious villains. There are psychedelic sequences with images of pills and brains and these tiny gray guys watching everything. Tortoise poop is a major plot driver.
All this in a show that’s really about the broken American health care system. And a mushroom that is, perhaps, connecting people’s consciousnesses? (You see why you’d have to trust your audience to be along for the ride.)
The other show is called Scavengers Reign, which ran for one season in 2023 on HBO Max, and is also streaming on Netflix.
Scavengers Reign has a simple concept: People crash-land on a planet full of sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile plants and animals. They go from point A to point B. It’s gorgeous and scary and heartbreaking. A lot of the story concerns the almost-mystical interactions of what seems like hundreds of species of plants and animals that we encounter along with the characters. It’s epic, but quietly so.
Joe Bennett shows a model of the robot Levi from “Scavengers Reign.” Credit: Brandon R. Reynolds
“I think it was thinking about ways of — if you're going to build out these environments and these ecosystems — to try as best as you can to be mindful of all the things that are going on,” says Joe Bennett, co-creator of both shows and Green Street Pictures. “And then I think a big thing too is just not necessarily labeling that or giving that out to the audience, keeping that almost internal. I think that's the fun part.”
(There’s that trusting-the-audience thing again.)
Bennett came from the world of indie animators who’d post shorts to Vimeo. He started collaborating with some of them, and in 2020, Green Street was born.
He says the timing was accidentally fortuitous. “COVID helped Green Street in a lot of ways, because all these studios were forced to work remotely in order to keep production going. And so all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh, not only can this work, but it also yields incredible results, people that are bringing totally different kinds of sensibilities to this.’”
Animators from 30 countries worked on Scavengers Reign, and the diversity of styles is evident: The humans and alien creatures look like they could’ve come out of an older era of animation, maybe something by legendary French cartoonist Jean “Moebius” Giraud. The machines and robots and pacing are sometimes closer to anime. The show is from everywhere and nowhere.
Common Side Effects brought in even more talent. That one came about because of Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, Silicon Valley) and Greg Daniels (The Office, Upload). Their animation company did King of the Hill. Judge knew Bennett and Daniels knew Hely, so they brought them together.
Two very different styles of creative careers. Bennett and the gang are Very Online indie animators, but Hely has the ideal, classic Hollywood career: he worked in late night, and on 30 Rock, Veep, The Office.
You have the most talented animators in the world used to pursuing very unique visions, and Hely, who’s worked on critically regarded, very successful shows. Plus Mike Judge, a noted iconoclast, who with Silicon Valley and Idiocracy has at last suffered the fate of all great satirists: He accidentally became a prophet for a dumber America.
It’s easy to be cynical about Hollywood these days — between studios’ dependence on recycled IP and cheaply made reality fare, there’s lots of derivative crap to be cynical about. But perhaps the most surreal thing coming out of little Green Street in Pasadena California is: their optimism.
But it’s paid off. Both shows earned glowing reviews from critics (and Scavengers Reign continues to be eulogized by fans on YouTube and Reddit). Bennett teases that maybe that story isn’t done just yet, but didn’t say more …
I visited their office a few days after they’d convened a writers’ room to start working on season two of Common Side Effects, and asked Bennett if it selling a unique vision (or two) has been an uphill battle.
“I think it's getting easier to sell these kinds of shows, but I do think it was bit of a challenge,” he says. “At least in animation, I feel like sincerity is being allowed in more — not everything has to be kind of slapstick comedy stuff, I think.”
Hely, for his part, credits their success to one simple ethos:
“Audiences are smarter than people sometimes give them credit for. And a show that was an interesting, propulsive, psychedelic crime drama comedy sounds like it might be hard to sell, but we believe that there was totally an audience for that out there,” he says. “Audiences are looking for interesting, strange stuff.”
Trusting in the intelligence of the public these days can itself seem like a mystical belief on par with the ability of a mushroom to psychically connect us all. Until someone discovers that, we’ve got to go snuffling around for very good, very uncommon, types of art.
*Correction 6/4/25: A previous version of this story said Common Side Effects just ended its first season on HBO Max. It's been corrected to Adult Swim.