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Common Side Effects’s Tiny Blue Mushroom Contains a World of Hurt
The animated series may revolve around a fantastical fungus, but its frustrated rage toward America’s health-care system is as real as it gets.
That tirade gets him a series of boos, and as he’s dragged out of the conference room, he says something prescient: “If I disappear, investigate Reutical Pharmaceuticals.” Marshall is sort of like a prophet — as if Tom Wilkinson from Michael Clayton was always toting around a tortoise named Socrates instead of a bag of baguettes — and he’s convinced big pharma, insurance companies, and the government are conspiring against us. It’s less prickly, say, than Pantheon, the AMC production turned Netflix animated sci-fi series about unethical tech companies uploading people’s consciousness into the cloud, governments and spy agencies latching on to the practice as a way to spread war and subterfuge, and both digital and corporeal individuals rioting to even the scales of power. But in giving itself more room to imagine what we can do to make our health-care system better, Common Side Effects feels less like fiction and more like the conversations we’re already having with friends and family after our medical claims are denied, or we’re on hold for hours with our health-insurance companies, or we learn that our prescription costs have multiplied with no advance notice.
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