One of the most anticipated projects on display at the 2026 Annecy Animation Festival is the second season of “Common Side Effects.”
A work-in-progress session offered first looks from the show. Its creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely as well as director Camille Bozec and executive producer Benjy Brooke of Green Street Pictures also ran through how Season 2 sought to expand on the first in scope of both its narrative and aesthetic.
The new footage, taken from the Season 2 premiere, picks up immediately where the end of Season 1 left off, with Marshall (Dave King) and Frances (Emily Pendergast) trying to figure out the best way to create an ethical, grass roots method of distributing the “Blue Angel,” a luminous blue mushroom which has the ability to cure all wounds and ailments.
The clip picks up on them hiking in Joshua Tree, intercutting with DEA Agent Harrington (Martha Kelly) in hot pursuit on motorcycle. After a tense standoff, the next scene follows on into a montage of Marshall and Frances travelling to Oregon, the scene playfully scored to “Blue Angel” by Roy Orbison (Marshall is depicted hitting a high note, before a match cut to him snoring).
During the panel, Brooke described the show as “a thriller series which plays off the history of thrillers,” continuing to say that in loose terms, if the first season was “‘The Big Lebowski’ meets ‘Michael Clayton,’” the follow-up trends more towards “‘The Insider meets ‘Indiana Jones. ‘” (“Erin Brockovich” is also mentioned repeatedly.)
In an interview with Variety, Bennett and Hely spoke of what they envisioned for the new season. “Season 1 did have this propulsive fugitive energy that starts at the beginning and just doesn’t let up,” says Hely. “And in Season 2, we were looking to try a different kind of tension: We’re holed up in our space, and what does that space look like?” As Hely describes it, this opens up a new series of questions about how to stay hidden and safe, and who to trust. This is of course complicated by a new antagonist introduced during the panel, named Thomas (voiced by Bob Stephenson, who was a voice actor for “Scavengers Reign”).
Thomas, as the team described during the panel, is envisioned as someone who already has an existing relationship with the Blue Angel mushroom, and treats it with religious obsession, in Hely’s words.
The session went over the nuances of the character’s design, partially inspired by actor Dave Bautista – highlighting a permanently furrowed brow and “thick hands.” There are new allies too, such as Eutychus (voiced by Matthew Maher), a bookstore owner and friend of Marshall who sports a “System of a Down beard”. Through discussion of Eutychus, the team also commented on how the acting reflects that “so much of this show is about very specific human beings and very specific problems,” according to Brooke, who then says that this is reflected in how the animation places emphasis on gesticulation of the hands as an expressive tool.
As well as the range of new characters, the new season brought with it new environments. Marshall and Frances travel to the Pacific Northwest, where much of the season is based. “One of our great background guys is from there,” says Hely, “and there’s sort of a spooky paranoia quality. These places are very foggy, some of them are a little dilapidated, you know, the fishing industry or the logging industry is gone, and there’s a lot of empty storefronts, and they attract kind of strange wanderers.” As well as playing with the mood of real locales, the new season also allowed for an expansion of the metaphysical space known as ‘The Portal,’ a dreamlike environment which people who have ingested the Blue Angel mushroom are all connected to, and though it, even to each other.
“There’s a lot more exploration in the portal world that Marshall is going to be doing,” Bennett told Variety, “there’s something really nice about each portal kind of experience being tailored to that person.” He continues, “there are relics of the real world like an inner psyche, [but] it feels kind of old and ancient.” The space allowed a little more freedom to add surrealist animation as it showed odd remants of the real world placed in an otherworldly desert. “What if that was just the surface of this,” Bennett teases of the explorations the team get into in Season 2.
In both the real and metaphysical locations of the show, the backgrounds are all painted by hand, something which was pointed out took up a lot of time due to the number of paintings in the show and due to the number of montages. “They are incredible painters,” Bennett says of the art team, complimenting their research and attention to detail. “Then it comes to doing more of the surreal elements, they take really fun liberties. That’s a big part of the show. Now more than ever. It’s like it’s human made, it just feels so good that it’s, not computer generated, not AI.”
During the work-in-progress session Brooke emphatically doubled down. “Green Street Pictures will never, ever, ever use AI. It’s about not letting oligarchs steal your future. Fuck AI, boycott AI,” he said to rapturous applause (“Are you running for something?” another panellist quipped).
To Brooke’s point, this anti-oligarchy point of view is reflected in the first season of “Common Side Effects,” which elegantly satirised the merciless capitalism of the healthcare industry in the U.S, placing Marshall in opposition to different parties who attempted to exploit his discovery for financial gain. Season 2 continues this thread, and Hely pondered the sense of exhaustion about living in this corporate world. “It’s like brand fatigue. Characters that have been stuck with a product for so long, and they don’t know what to do with it. How do we recycle this into something new?”
Of course, there are complications of trying to break out from this system. “Humans tend to spend so much time thinking about how we can build something up so quickly, and not really understand the repercussions to it,” Bennett adds. “And so seeing that, how that kind of like plays out, and the who’s accountable, and how it kind of like falls apart. I think that’s a big part of the show, just people kind of fumbling that.”
“Common Side Effects” Season 2 is due to release on Adult Swim in early 2027.
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