Common Side Effects Creators Talk Crafting a Conspiracy, Season 2 Hopes & More

Common Side Effects will be making its debut with Adult Swim later this weekend, and ComicBook got the chance to speak with the original creators behind it all. Adult Swim is gearing up for a new year of animated originals, and the first of these efforts seems to be one of the most unique new projects yet. Common Side Effects introduces fans to Marshall Cuso, someone who has found a miracle mushroom that seems like it can instantly heal any fatal wound or disease when its eaten. But naturally such a drug could either save the world or throw it all into chaos.

From that point, Common Side Effects unfurls a huge conspiracy that’s multi-layered with many characters and stories all unfolding at the same time. It’s so much to unpack that ComicBook got the chance to speak with Common Side Effects creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely all about the new Adult Swim series ahead of its premiere on Sunday, February 2nd. We got to ask about navigating conspiracies amidst some real world troubles, Copano and Harrington’s viral scene breaking out into the world, their hopes for Season 2 and more.

Read on below for our full inteview with Joe Bennett and Steve Hely (which has been edited for brevity and clarity).

NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: I do have to start with the biggest question that’s been getting at me since getting to watch Common Side Effects. You’ve probably been asked this a ton of times, but “Geggory.” It’s such a specific name. Is there a real Geggory that inspired it? Was this on a list of names and you just happened to land on it?

STEVE HELY: Joe and I go to the coffee shop almost every day, and just talking I know Joe likes to do the voice of the coffee shop guy when he announces the name. Just both shouting.

JOE BENNETT: I think baristas are taught a certain kind of etiquette where it’s like “I need to make sure that, because it’s such a crowded coffee shop, I need to make sure that people can hear me, but I don’t wanna sound like I’m yelling.” So it’s like a kind of form of, like, ‘Flat white for Geggory. Geggory.’ And I think I kept bugging Steve about that.

HELY: Almost every day, we have a time to contemplate the auditing topic shot. But maybe everybody does.

It was also cool hearing Mike Judge as Geggory too, and he does a bunch of additional voices throughout. But I’m curious as to how you two came to collaborate on Common Side Effects overall. When did Judge and Greg Daniels get into the process?

BENNETT: Mike Judge and Greg Daniels started an animation studio. Steve had worked with Greg in the past on The Office, and I knew Mike Judge, and he wanted to sync us together. They paired us, and we got together and started chatting. And, within the first day, realized that there was a lot of overlapping kind of sensibilities and themes that we were interested in. We talked about health care, and mushrooms, and then slowly but surely, we started thinking about these sort of thought experiments. What would happen if you were to bring a medicine that could cure anything? What would be the repercussions of that? Who would come out and try to stop you? That sort of thing. Then it helped us to start to develop the show.

On those lines too, what goes into developing a full pharmaceutical, politically charged thriller? Did you have to do research into actual conspiracy theories while crafting your own? Was it, “Oh, we need to make sure to keep comedy in there because there are more cartoonish elements to exaggerate?” What was the finding the balance like?

HELY: We did a lot of research. We tried to talk to people from different points of view. We talked to a retired DEA agent. We talked to some people who worked in the pharmaceutical business. We talked to mycologists. Anybody who would talk to us, we tried to learn their perspective on it. And a lot of that, a lot of what you’re talking about, the comedy just came from little weird observations these people had or stories they told us. Some of it, we just sort of imagined what it would be like, and some of it we knew from studying things, or talking to people, or just tracking how people’s motivations would spin out and pretty quickly develop a complicated world.

Speaking of the DEA, Copano and Harrington quickly became viral outside of the animation sphere with the “Jump In The Line” sequence. It’s cool to see subdued moments like that in animation overall since that’s more of a live-action kind of play. How was it developing that sequence and developing Capano and Harrington’s personalities?

HELY: I think Joe is looking for ways to tell as much as possible about characters, and relationships without needing any dialogue or anything.

BENNETT: Actually that particular sequence has a funny history because that was a little piece that Steve and I made to sell the show. Basically to pair it with our pitch sequence because we didn’t have actors at the time, and we were trying to figure out a way to show the kind of a relationship between these two characters. So having them in a sequence, where it’s just a visual sequence of just them dancing to Harry Belafonte, we used as a sort of a little proof of concept. And then, started making the show from that.

We were fortunate enough to have Martha Kelly (Agent Harrington) and Joseph Lee Anderson (Agent Copano) do the voices and really pack more into the characters later on, but that was our starting point. And it was really just…limited resources is kind of the reason for that whole thing.

I like that was a little thing to give them more personality because you do have quite a few characters and threads in the series. It’s a big conspiracy. What went into kind of crafting a “villain” for it. Because the DEA agents in any other kind of thriller like this would be the bad guys per se, but what’s the balance of finding how far to go with certain characters?

BENNETT: I think that Steve and I had just talked about, from the get go, trying to make these characters as multidimensional as possible. Not to necessarily label characters as like a tropey villain, or the hero and the bad guy. You have it where there’s some people that make bad decisions or have shitty jobs, and have to make certain choices that they may not even want to. This makes, I think, a more realistic, natural, thread of characters and relationships that just felt a lot more exciting.

HELY: We’re always trying to think about everything from each character’s point of view. Even somebody who might seem like the CEO of a big pharma company, he has a point of view that is, “Hey, I’m out here, making valuable products. Yeah, I’m making money, but I need that money to create new products. If you’re mad at me for charging a lot, that money’s going into inventing new medicines, and nobody’s mad about that.” Or a DEA Agent could have the perspective of, “Hey. Like, the people who sell fentanyl and stuff are the most evil people in the world. They’re killing thousands of Americans. I’m a patriot in a violent, dangerous job on the front lines of defending this country.”

So no matter whether or not your political views might align with that, you can always see something from the perspective of the characters. Once you start doing that, everybody becomes more interesting. The stories become a little more compelling, and just feels truer to the way people are. Nobody’s going around thinking “I’m a villain.”

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There’s a lot of care and attention paid to keeping a very grounded world, but you get to explore a heightened reality and magical realism with the mushroom sequences. How trippy were you allowed to get with these mushroom sequences, and when it came to us us getting to see what people see when they eat these them?

BENNETT: We were allowed to get trippy. We were trying to think of certain motifs and environments that made sense for that world. I think I’ve always wanted to be careful about not falling into just sort of typical cliche, psychedelic, tropey, animated stuff. To try to come up with something that feels a little bit more real, or just a little bit more unique. I don’t know. I think that was the exciting part of the show is that you have these kind of grounded moments in reality. It’s a nice contrast with these kind of portal sequences.

It was a thing we had talked about in the room of figuring out the unspoken rules of the portal world. What it means, how do characters communicate, what does that all entail. But, I think it’s nice to kind of have some ambiguity there, and let the audience discover things on their own.

Just as a final question, I do have to ask this. I know Common Side Effects is just coming out, but as of right now, is there interest in potentially continuing this with a follow-up of a second season or potentially more?

HELY: Yeah, we’ve pitched out a second season, and we have begun some work on a second season. We hope to tell these stories for a long time to come. We’re here talking to you to spread the word and make sure people watch the show…But in success, yeah, I hope we keep going for a long time.

I might as well slip in this question too. How do you feel now that it’s finally going to make its full debut? You’ve had premieres of the first episode at [Annecy International Animation Film Festival] and [San Diego Comic-Con 2024] weekend, but how do you feel now that it’s actually coming out in full?

BENNETT: Oh, very excited. Very excited. Yeah.

HELY: It’s great to see. To hear people’s reactions are always interesting and strange. It’s exciting, fun, and scary.

BENNETT: Very validating.

HELY: Yeah. When people see exactly what we’re trying to do, it’s cool too.

Common Side Effects premieres on Adult Swim on Sunday, February 2nd at 11:30PM ET