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Green Street Pictures has landed two adult animated series — “Scavangers Reign” and “Common Side Effects” — on major platforms in after barely five years in business. And while “Scavengers Reign” wasn’t picked up for a second season by Max, that hasn’t deterred Green Street co-founders Sean Buckelew, Joe Bennett, James Merrill and Benjy Brooke from planning out the entire season.
But when it comes to “Common Side Effects,” the news that Adult Swim has renewed it for Season 2 means that Green Street Pictures no longer has to let their storyboards do the dreaming. They’re in the hot seat, making the kind of idiosyncratic animated shows for adults they’ve always wanted to.
“We came together almost more as a filmmaking sensibility rather than an animation-first sensibility,” Buckelew tells Variety. “When we say independent and scrappy, part of that is that you’re making films just end-to-end on your own with a small team, which for us was an opportunity to make things in a creatively uninhibited space. That was really exciting.”
After a series of conversations and meetings over the years, Merrill says that everything started coming together in 2020. “It felt like we were a part of a community that was ready to start getting shows on the air,” Merrill says. “And more than that, there was now an audience for this kind of material.”
Spread across two floors of a building in Pasadena’s downtown Old Town district, the company is settling into their third office space in the past five years. While many production studios struggled during the pandemic, Green Street Pictures had an unexpected leg-up from the start.
“When everybody had to move to working collaboratively and remotely, it felt like we were already poised to work that way and already had the network of people to work with,” Buckelew says. “We’re digitally grown-up artists that were raised on the internet.”
Many of the creatives who worked on “Scavengers Reign” also went on to “Common Side Effects.” The group having an in-house team of line producers, production managers and writers is crucial to their workflow. But they also collaborate with animators across the globe, including artists in France, Greece and Argentina.
“We did something on ‘Scavengers’ where everybody posted the flag of the country they were in in one of our group chats — there were like 30 different countries that were working on the show,” Buckelew says. “That was astounding.”
Opening the pipeline is crucial for the team. For example, every director who worked on “Scavengers Reign” had never directed a full episode of TV before, including Brooke, who went on to direct episodes of “Common Side Effects.”
“We came from people doing a lot of independent shorts,” Brooke says. “What that offered was an opportunity to bring a lot of new talent into the ecosystem, which has really been our ethos from the beginning.”
Brooke, who recruits animators, designers and storyboard artists onto the team, says it’s important to find new talent with a “sensitive, creative dowsing rod.” The key is never to find people based on their exact style, but instead seeing what “ineffable” quality they will add to any project.
Or, as Bennett, co-creator of “Scavengers Reign” and “Common Side Effects” puts it more bluntly, it’s important to find people who simply “give a shit.”
With the “Common Side Effects” renewal, the studio is hoping to get more feature films off the ground, with their current projects too early in development to announce. But despite the studio’s goal of expanding into filmmaking, the thematic through-line of their work isn’t changing.
“There’s a shared sensibility of always trying to treat characters in an even-handed way as a fallible human,” Buckelew says. “It’s people acting like people and sometimes that’s brave, sometimes that’s cowardly, sometimes that’s stupid. As much as ‘Common Side Effects’ is critical of the system, it’s made out of regular people just going through their day. I would never want to write a villain who’s evil for the sake of being evil. That just seems boring.”
(Pictured: Sean Buckelew, Joe Bennett, James Merrill and Benjy Brooke)
English (US) ·