In ‘Common Side Effects,’ A Clash Over An All-Healing Mushroom

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman.

In the new Adult Swim show Common Side Effects, an eccentric scientist has a secret. He’s discovered a strange mushroom that can cure any illness or injury, and he wants to get it to the people in need. The only problem is that a pharmaceutical company doesn’t want that secret to get out and will do anything to make sure he’s stopped.

The show is pioneering a brand-new genre that I hope will dominate my algorithm, the mycological thriller.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– This might look like individual fungi, but what you’re seeing is a single intelligence.

– The blue angel mushroom could have effects 100 times anything we’ve ever seen.

– They want to nip in the bud.

– I’ll call the DEA right now. Whatever it takes.

[END PLAYBACK]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joining me now to talk about this fungal drama are the show’s creators, Steve Hely and Joe Bennett. Steve was a writer for 30 Rock and Veep, and Joe is creator of the animated sci-fi show Scavengers Reign on Max. Welcome to Science Friday.

STEVE HELY: A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us.

JOE BENNETT: Thanks for having us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so this story revolves around a magical mushroom. Are either of you fungi freaks?

STEVE HELY: We’re both enthusiasts of mushrooms as an insane phenomena. It’s hard not to be interested in mushrooms, and the more you learn about them, the more interesting they become. Some of them will kill you. Some of them are delicious. Some of them make you feel funny. They communicate. There’s so much we have to learn about them.

JOE BENNETT: They’re older than humans.

STEVE HELY: Older than plants and animals, yes. I think it’s fair to say we’re pretty interested in mushrooms.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, you talk about them lovingly, and you write about them lovingly. Let me play a quick clip.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– A mushroom.

– Not just any mushroom, the caviar, the ghost orchid of mushrooms. I mean, the chances of this growing naturally, Frances, it’s like a 1 in a billion Goldilocks situation. A special valley isolated by mountains. The fog lasts just long enough. Humidity is just right. The limestone in the soil is perfect to produce a rare, specific kind of grass, and in this grass grows a very, very intense mushroom, and I found it.

[END PLAYBACK]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did you base your mushroom off of a real mushroom? Like, was there some inspirational mushroom for you?

STEVE HELY: There is a mushroom in New Zealand– I forget the scientific name for it– that’s like bright blue. But I had gone to– I wrote a book about a journey I took through South America, and I tried some of the various plant medicines on offer down there, like ayahuasca and stuff like that. And Joe and I were talking about this, and we got to talking about a sort of thought experiment of if there were a medicine that could cure almost anything, what would that look like, and what would happen?

And a mushroom felt right because mushrooms are strange, and our human interactions with them are a little strange. They’re kind of hard to grow. Humans have a long history of harvesting plants and fruits and nuts and stuff, but mushrooms are a little– they feel like they’re difficult to contain, and that seemed exciting from a storytelling perspective.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The bad actor in your story is a pharmaceutical company. And, of course, right now, there’s tremendous pushback and discontent with the pharmaceutical industry. Why did you want to explore this?

STEVE HELY: Joe and I are interested in how interacting with the healthcare system is annoying.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, we all know.

STEVE HELY: Yeah, but on the other hand, it brings us all these wonderful things. I mean, people keep asking us if big pharma is the enemy, but we’re all grateful to big pharma for the wonderful products they’ve provided. But on the other hand, once you have systems that are profit driven and motivated by things like stock price and shareholder value, warped incentives enter into the system. And our villains in the show aren’t exactly– we don’t intend for it to be like a particular evil person, but rather like the way the system kind of warps and changes and creates these twisted outcomes for people.

FLORA LICHTMAN: On that same note, I think scientists can often be flattened in pop culture. Like in TV and movies, this is a pet peeve of mine. They end up just being like the jargony, dweeby, socially challenged man, and I didn’t feel that way about your scientists. And I wondered if you thought about that, like breaking that stereotype at all.

STEVE HELY: Well, we were thinking about– there are a whole bunch of characters who are kind of on the fringe of science, like people who are out there kind of pushing it. And sometimes what they’re doing is not fully accepted right away, and it takes a while for it to enter into the mainstream, and often they can seem a little strange. But as you mentioned earlier, they can be kind of charismatic and exciting.

JOE BENNETT: Yeah, and from that kind of fringe side, John Laroche from Adaptation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right, the movie based on the orchid thief.

JOE BENNETT: Right. We kept going back to this guy. Like, he’s such a– he’s maybe a little– he’s a little dirty. He’s a little unhinged. He’s got dirt under his nails, but he’s super confident. He’s extremely smart. He would always just sort of represent himself in court. He can kind of find the loopholes in things and ways of getting around things.

STEVE HELY: And these characters are also funny, and they often have contradictions. Joe and I, we went to visit a great desert botanist out in the Mojave Desert, and this is a person who’s very in touch with the natural world and knows how to raise all kinds of desert plants. And we went to see her, and she just had a 32-ounce Carl’s Jr. Pepsi on her desk. And both the blend of the stuff that we eat and drink and the natural stuff and chemicals and all that mixed up seemed exciting to us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joe, why animation for this show?

JOE BENNETT: I came from a sort of independent animation background, and animation for me was just a means to tell a story. I’ve fallen more and more in love with the idea of 2D animation and things that are hand drawn. It just feels like, especially this day and age, it’s nice to see like, this is a scene that was crafted by a human person and people really labored over this. You can kind of see it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joe, let’s talk about your other show, Scavengers Reign, a little bit. So this is an animated show about a group of people trying to survive after they crash on an alien world. And to me, it was sort of like Miyazaki meets David Attenborough, like nature documentary set in another world. Let’s play a clip.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– This place, nothing really makes sense. It’s like a puzzle.

– We just can’t help the instinct to give meaning to things we don’t understand.

– Oh, God. I think there’s something out there.

[END PLAYBACK]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Joe, how are these two shows related in your mind?

JOE BENNETT: I think a big part of it was just humans and their relationship with nature. I grew up in the woods. My parents built a log cabin, and I was surrounded by 20 acres of woods. I had no neighbors. I guess as a child, there were times where it felt a little insufferable, but kind of in hindsight, I feel like it really fostered my creativity. And, also, I developed a profound respect for and interest in nature.

And I think I would say that the main overlapping themes of these two things are our relationship with nature and the sort of certain fragility and, I guess, the repercussions on when it’s being abused. And I guess thinking about sort of mycelium, the idea of mycelium as a neural network that’s connecting all of these plants and organisms, and I just got really inspired by all that. And even today, we’re still uncovering all of this incredible stuff in nature. Just trees are able to talk to each other. That’s just insane to think about, and that was like a more recent discovery. It’s just wild.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. No, I mean, I love the creatures in Scavengers Reign. I just find them so engaging. And I wondered, what’s your process for dreaming up animals or nature on another planet?

JOE BENNETT: Well, it’s funny that you ask that because me and my cocreator, Charles, we really had a difficult time trying to come up with something that doesn’t already exist in nature on Earth. It was like almost all of it’s already here, and we’re just not aware of it. So a lot of it was just sort of cherry picking from that. And you say David Attenborough. I mean, I was watching nature docs nonstop, and I was like, it’s all there. There’s so many mind-blowing, symbiotic relationships that are just so inspiring and almost kind of like, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That came through. I mean, for nature lovers, it felt like there were all these kind of Easter eggs when you saw the aliens doing these behaviors that we know exist on Earth, like organisms enlisting other organisms to collect their food for them. So I really appreciated that about the show.

Steve, on Veep and 30 Rock, obviously you’re exploring politics and the world of TV. Do you think there’s untilled ground for comedies that take place in a science context?

STEVE HELY: Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, there’s a lot that’s weird and paradoxical and strange about science and biology, and it’s both funny and strange that we are walking around in these biological units that are confining and also exciting. And we’ll never quite understand, and we’re all trying to master them with our brains, which are, of course, also part of the biology. So it’s a mess when you start to think about, and that makes for comedy.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, this is my secret hope– not secret because I’m telling you. I really want someone to make the lab, like an Office style show–

STEVE HELY: Oh yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –set in a lab.

STEVE HELY: Let’s collab off channel.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m here for it. Help me make this happen.

STEVE HELY: We try to live every day like it’s Science Friday.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: All right, well, that seems like the perfect place to leave it. Thank you both for taking the time to chat.

JOE BENNETT: Thanks for having us.

STEVE HELY: Thank you, Flora. It’s a pleasure to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Steve Hely and Joe Bennett are the creators of the series Common Side Effects, now airing on Adult Swim and streaming on Max. And if you want to learn about how real-life scientists are searching for hidden fungi, read the latest article from our newsletter Science Goes to the Movies at sciencefriday.com/sideeffects.

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