Adult Swim – Memphis Flyer

The elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the office of secretary of health and human services is a symptom of a deep problem in the United States: We hate our healthcare system.

There are a lot of reasons to hate the horrifying and deadly kludge that passes for a healthcare “system” in this country. Even the newly installed CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Andrew Witty, admitted in a New York Times op-ed published in the wake of his predecessor’s murder by vigilante Luigi Mangione that no sane person would design a healthcare system like this. And yet, there Witty is, turning the crank on the peasant grinder and collecting the coins that come out the other side. UnitedHealth’s $14 billion in profits, and Witty’s personal $23 million pay, is a powerful motivator for him and his comrades to keep things as messed up (and expensive) as possible. Looking at the United States of 2025, there’s only one possible conclusion: The for-profit healthcare model delivers profits, but it cannot deliver healthcare.

Instead of blaming those who are actually at fault — pharmaceutical companies, hospital conglomerates, and the entire concept of health insurance — many people have been led to reject the things that the people actually practicing medicine do well, like vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy sells snake oil and vaccine skepticism so the public doesn’t turn on the people who are getting rich by making them poorer and sicker.

The hero of the new Adult Swim animated show Common Side Effects knows exactly where to place the blame. Marshall Cuso (voiced by veteran comedy writer Dave King) has the look of someone who entered mycology because of his fondness for psilocybin. His Hawaiian shirt is always unbuttoned, his beard is scruffy, and he probably sleeps in his bucket hat. But despite his appearance, he is a serious scholar of mushrooms who studied with Hildy (Sue Rose), a respected academic who has since retired.

Marshall’s mushroom obsession leads him to the jungles of Peru in search of a legendary mushroom known as the Blue Angel. The mushroom is said to have healing properties, but when Marshall finally does find a circle of them, it turns out to be much more potent than anyone imagined. Just a few bites of the little blue mushrooms will cure everything from a rash to a gunshot wound.

The spot where Marshall finds the mushrooms is remote, but it’s hardly untouched. Just a little way upstream is a pharmaceutical factory run by the Reutical corporation, which is polluting the ground and water. Fearing that he might have found the last of the endangered mushrooms, Marshall picks a few samples and makes plans to return home. But before he can, he is attacked by unknown forces and barely escapes the country with his life.

Back in the United States, and in a state of maximum paranoia, he turns to his former lab partner and college friend Frances (Emily Pendergast). She’s a kind soul who has leveraged her biology degree into a healthcare job, and Marshall thinks maybe she could help him bring this miracle drug to the masses, curing practically all diseases overnight. But little does Marshall know that Frances works for Reutical as an executive assistant to CEO Rick Kruger (Mike Judge).

Marshall finds himself trapped with no one to trust but his turtle Socrates, and possibly his half-brother Zane (Alan Resnick). Meanwhile, the mysterious armed men who first found him in Peru are hot on his trail. Their boss, Swiss financier Jonas Backstein, views the mushrooms as a threat to the entire pharmaceutical industrial complex, and wants them and Marshall destroyed.

The way series creators Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely draw both their protagonist Marshall and antagonist Rick reveals a lot about what makes Common Side Effects such compelling viewing. No one is perfect, and no one is purely hero or villain. Marshall sees the world clearly, but he’s also a wild-eyed idealist and something of a self-sabotaging bumbler. He takes everything seriously and carefully calculates his next move to the point of overthinking. Rick is a man of wealth and power, but he has no intention of using his position for anything but self-enrichment. He can barely check into a hotel without Frances’ help.

Meanwhile, Frances must care for her mother Sonia (Lin Shaye), a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient whose insurance is about to kick her out of the nursing home. Rick is afraid the company’s recent disappointing earnings report is going to cost him his job, and he needs a new breakthrough medicine to satisfy the board of directors. Frances finds herself caught between loyalty to her friend and the needs of her job. Meanwhile, Marshall’s reappearance in her life has rekindled an old flame, and her current boyfriend Nick (Ben Feldman) is an oblivious oaf.

Bennett was also a producer of Scavengers Reign, the excellent sci-fi animation that was canceled by Netflix after only one season. The animation style of Common Side Effects is a similar combination of naturalistic environments and somewhat stylized character designs. Adult Swim is famous for the absurdist style of animated comedy the network pioneered, but this show, while often funny, is their first foray into serialized thriller. The laughs come from the character’s foibles, like Rick’s inexplicable addiction to playing farming simulator games on his phone while he should be working. Don’t let the animation fool you into thinking this show isn’t a serious work of art. Common Side Effects is one of the best shows on television.

The Common Side Effects season finale airs on Adult Swim on Sunday at 11:30 p.m. The entire series is available for streaming on Max.

Pendleton Ward created of one of the most sneakily influential shows of the 21st century. Adventure Time started as a short animated project for Nickelodeon in 2008 and was picked up as a series by Cartoon Network in 2010. By the time it went off the air in 2018, it had earned seven Emmy Awards and burrowed itself into the consciousness of a generation.

Like all great children’s entertainment, Adventure Time looks simple and goofy on the surface, but grows in depth and sophistication as you look closer. The episodic journeys of Jake the Dog and Finn the Human bring them into contact with a rich visual world full of unique characters. While the show follows basic fantasy framework of questing hero and loyal sidekick fighting evil and righting wrongs with a sword, the characters never fall into cliché.

Princess Bubblegum, Finn’s apparent love interest, never returns his affections. Instead, they just stay friends. Even more radically, the Ice King, Finn’s rival, is never defeated and humiliated. Instead, the origin of his trauma, which is intertwined with the apocalyptic origin of the Kingdom of Ooo, is explored. Adventure Time is fantasy imbued with radical empathy. Although other shows like Stephen Universe have aspired to emulate the formula, none have done so with as much success.

Ward burned out and bowed out of running Adventure Time at the height of its popularity. In 2014, when Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss asked him if he would ever consider creating another show, he said, “No, never. That sounds like a nightmare!”

I hope the creation of Ward’s new Netflix series The Midnight Gospel wasn’t too traumatic. But the show is deeply concerned with trauma, especially the final trauma of death. Be warned, despite the presence of a pegasus who pukes ice cream, this is not a children’s show. “Can I say shit?” asks the personification of Death, voiced by YouTube celebrity mortician Caitlin Doughty. The answer is yes.

Clancy Gilroy (voiced by Duncan Trussell) lives in a mobile home in a candy-colored dimension called the Chromatic Ribbon. His big obsession is a used universe simulator he bought with money he borrowed from his unseen sister, which he uses to escape from the responsibilities of his life. He travels through pocket universes contained in his malfunctioning supercomputer, meeting their most interesting inhabitants and interviewing them for his podcast … er, spacecast.

The setup is both fantastical and relatable. Clancy’s spacecast has fewer than a dozen subscribers, but he sees each one of them as individual validations of his life. He, in turn, relates to the fantastical realms of the simulated multiverse more deeply than he does to his shabby “real” surroundings, which may just be another level of simulation, anyway.

Adventure Time was written in the storyboard phase instead of beginning with a prose script, and the technique was vital in shaping its unconventional narratives. The Midnight Gospel is more like Home Movies or Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. These early Adult Swim shows began with semi-improvised dialogue tracks, which the animators then created visuals to accompany. Most of this show’s dialogue is based on a podcast by Trussell, a comedy writer with a particularly philosophical streak.

Clancy’s guests on the show mouth words from the real-life guests on the podcast as they deal with their own drama in their crumbling, psychedelic worlds. In the first episode, Dr. Drew appears as the president of an America in the grips of a zombie apocalypse. Clancy discusses LSD trips with him as the walking dead close in. Writer Anne Lamott is a deer-dog who is captured and ground into food for clowns during the course of her interview. Damien Echols appears as Darryl, a fish in a spacesuit herding cats, as he tells Clancy about the history of ritual magic and the meditation techniques he used to stay sane while on death row for 18 years. In the mind-bending finale, Ram Dass appears as himself.

The show’s visuals bear Ward’s mark of deceptive simplicity, but with a mix of animation techniques that were not available to Adventure Time. But all that visual bravado leads to The Midnight Gospel’s biggest weakness: excessive information density. In episode 5, “Annihilation of Joy,” as an inmate in an interdimensional space prison is trapped in a Groundhog Day-like time loop of the moment he failed to escape, a dove played by Jason Louv describes the spiritual insights he gained when he “… did a tremendous amount of DMT while having sex with multiple people.” It just gets to be a lot to take in at once.

I don’t want to sound like Emperor Joseph complaining that Mozart’s music has “too many notes,” but on the other hand, I don’t recommend bingeing all eight episodes at once, like I did. This is a show to be absorbed slowly. The Midnight Gospel is a rewarding journey for grown-up Adventure Time fans and general spiritual seekers alike. Be thankful it is presented in 30-minute chunks.

Midnight Gospel streams on Netflix.