Review: Common Side Effects “Pilot” ; “Lakeshore Limited”

Overview

“Pilot”

Marshall Cuso shows up in NYC with a mushroom, that can cure any disease or injury; his old classmate, Frances, meets him by chance, but keeps secret that she works for Reutical, a pharmaceutical company.

“Lakeshore Limited”

Marshall is on the run, trying to flee New York; Frances confides to her boss, Rick, about the mushroom; Rick sends her to Marshall’s farm to get more, but the situation gets out of hand.

Our Take

This series may be called Common Side Effects, but there isn’t anything “common” about this show. Coming from co-creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely and produced by Green House, Common Side Effects sees two former High School (maybe sweethearts?) in Marshall (Dave King) and Frances (Emily Pendergast) reconnect after so many years for the purposes of work-related hi-jinks. For Marshall it’s to both preserve and let the world know about a new magical mushroom that can give people Wolverine-like powers of being able to heal any injury or sickness known to man. Ironically, Frances works in pharmaceuticals for a company called Reutical run by executives CEO Rick Kruger(Mike Judge) and featuring board member Jonas Backstein (Danny Huston). Frances wants to work with Marshall to bring the drug to her bosses who need a home runs drug to turn around business and become profitable again. What she doesn’t seem to understand is that Jonas is behind the efforts to try and make sure this drug never sees the light of day because cure all drugs are bad for business. While all this is happening, the DEA is on the case to investigate criminal activity.

You may think that I have given a lot away at this point, you would be sorely mistaken. There are twists, turns, murders, pet turtles, and everything in between. Just as you think you’re going to get induced by the nuanced comedic performances and silly sight gags WHAM a cold slab of an almost-animated docu-series about the cold dark mythos that is the pharma industry. The acting performances are fantastic top-to-bottom with dialogue that will have you laughing hysterically one-minute and in shock the next.

Joe Bennett’s been at this for a while. Ever since FXX’s Cake Joe has slowly built up an underground following that with Scavengers Reign now sees him with some of the most important animation producers of this millennia. Common Side Effects only adds to this run of perfection but that’s not to say that I didn’t notice one-or-two technical flaws. For starters, the pilot episode starts off very busy with the musical score and dialogue often times clashing for the majority of the episode and had it not been for the fact that I knew that Agent Harrington was voiced by a woman (Martha Kelly who is fabulous, btw) the character design at first glance almost looked identical to Marshall’s including the character’s build, but as the episodes and you get to know everyone this starts to subside and the more effeminate features for Harrington start to come through.

These are very small gripes, most of which that went away, for what is an already very impressive debut and the rest of the season can’t get here fast enough.