An animated thriller takes on Big Pharma, with ‘King of the Hill’ heart

We know that animation can express just about anything live-action film can, and in ways live-action film can’t. Every animator creates a physically individual world, with its own topography and architecture and differently shaped characters. So when animators take on an established live-action genre, the result can feel both known and transformed.

With its use of caricature, distortion and exaggeration, art can look “grotesque” without conveying grotesqueness; indeed, it can convey something quite the opposite. Like many of the most original cartoons, the drawing in “Common Side Effects,” premiering Sunday on Adult Swim and streaming from Monday on Max, is less reminiscent of anything from animated history than it is of underground comics. The characters have big heads and little bodies with tiny mouths and hands; that they’re out of proportion and in some cases even a little crude does not interfere with their expressiveness or make them ridiculous. (Painterly backgrounds ground their reality.) They perfectly embody the more or less normal people they represent — though, being characters in an extravagant fiction, they are not average.

Created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, the series concerns a blue mushroom. Not a “magic mushroom,” but a mushroom whose panacean properties are as good as magic, a potential cure-all, discovered in a Peruvian forest by Marshall (Dave King), a sweet, sort-of-renegade botanist. Big and bearded, shirt ever open, in shorts and sandals and a bucket hat, he’s under surveillance by the government, which as part of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex is not keen to have that business destroyed. The health industry, in this telling, is willing literally — rather than just incidentally — to kill to keep people sick.

After disrupting a presentation by Rick (Mike Judge, also an executive producer), the president of a company called Reutical Pharmaceutical, Marshall is approached by Frances (Emily Pendergast), who knew him in high school — one of those “pretty girl lab-partnered with the nerd” situations. She hides from him the fact that she’s the assistant to the very man he has just been attacking, and after Marshall demonstrates to her the mushroom’s curative properties, she decides to take it to her sick-of-it-all boss, who’s worried he’s about to lose his job. (Business has been bad.)

A still from “Common Side Effects.”

(Adult Swim)

“He’s not even smart enough to be evil,” Marshall will say of Rick, a man who picks his nose after a sip of wine. “He’s just a functionary of demonic forces; he’s like the devil’s idiot butler.”

On Marshall’s trail are a pair of partnered DEA agents — neither good guys nor bad guys, just DEA agents, of a likable comic sort — Harrington (Martha Kelly, from “Baskets,” in full Kelly effect) and Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson), who banter in the familiar manner of cops condemned to killing time, play each other favorite tunes and shrug their shoulders in time to the music. (Harrington has a nice bit of throwaway business, distracting herself with Scotch tape; Copano we see in his underwear watching a samurai film and eating Chinese leftovers.) But other, darker agents are employed by other, darker agencies. And so Marshall goes on the run, with a tortoise he brought back from Peru, intersecting with Frances as he goes. Eventually, one would guess, they will be running together.

There is some psychedelic weirdness when the mushrooms do their work, involving visions of little hairless creatures, but it is in most ways, in the four episodes available to review, a workaday world. (Of course, things might get stranger later; this is Adult Swim, after all.) You know these characters without having to be told much about them. But while the story could conceivably be told with live actors in real settings, it would likely be so exaggerated, so satirical, that the human element, paradoxically, might get lost. Animation keeps it humble, believable and meaningful.

This is all a function of good writing and underplayed acting; the mood is largely deadpan. There are chases and gunfire, a cast of strange incidental characters and a robot spider camera, but the approach is largely straightforward — adapting the slice-of-life comedy purveyed by Judge and Greg Daniels (also an executive producer here) in their “King of the Hill” into a semi-comical conspiracy thriller, with heart. And all the best thrillers are semi-comical, with heart.