There is a moment in almost every psychedelic episode of television when someone looks at their friend with the terrified expression of a person who has made several terrible decisions and says some version of:
“Are you seeing that too?”
And honestly, television has never been happier to hear the question.
At some point, getting high stopped being just something characters did in the background.
Now it is a plot device.
A narrative shortcut.
A visual playground.
A way to make characters say things they would normally never say, walk into situations they would normally never enter and temporarily exist in a world where the writers can basically do whatever they want.
The latest example is Adults, the Gen Z hangout comedy that recently used an entire episode around a group of friends taking acid while dealing with a raccoon in their apartment. The result is exactly what you would expect from that sentence and somehow even more chaotic.
But Adults is hardly alone.
Television has been getting increasingly comfortable with altered states, from weed and mushrooms to LSD and other hallucinogens.
And there is a reason the trope keeps coming back.
Because drugs are one of the easiest ways for television to temporarily break the rules of reality.
The psychedelic episode is basically television saying, “What if?”
Most sitcoms operate inside a predictable universe.
The characters have jobs.
They have apartments.
They have relationships.
They have the same emotional problems every week.
Then somebody eats a brownie.
Suddenly the entire architecture collapses.
A character sees their dead relative.
Someone becomes convinced their furniture is talking.
Another person discovers they have been secretly in love with their best friend.
Someone spends twelve minutes staring at a lamp.
The writers have permission to become completely unhinged.
And audiences love it because we know there is an expiration date.
The episode will end.
The characters will come down.
Reality will return.
It is a temporary escape from the temporary escape that television already provides.
Getting high is also a very efficient way to reveal character
The most interesting thing about these episodes is rarely the drug itself.
It is what the drug reveals.
The control freak becomes paranoid.
The anxious character becomes even more anxious.
The emotionally repressed character suddenly starts saying everything they have been avoiding.
The person who always jokes about everything becomes strangely sincere.
The character who insists they are fine is absolutely not fine.
In that sense, the psychedelic episode is basically group therapy with terrible lighting.
The drug does not create the personality.
It exaggerates it.
And television has been using altered states to do exactly this for decades.
The difference now is that the aesthetic has changed.
The new psychedelic episode is less “stoner comedy” and more existential crisis
The old television version of getting high was often straightforward.
Someone smokes weed.
Someone gets hungry.
Someone gets paranoid.
Someone eats an unreasonable amount of food.
Cue laughter.
Modern shows seem more interested in what happens when altered states collide with identity, anxiety, friendship and adulthood.
That makes sense.
The young characters at the centre of today’s television are already dealing with a world that feels slightly unreal.
Housing is expensive.
Work is unstable.
Dating is conducted through apps.
Everyone is online.
Nobody knows whether their job will exist next year.
And every few minutes somebody on TikTok is telling you that you are living through a historical moment.
Of course a character takes a psychedelic and starts questioning reality.
Reality itself has been acting strange.
There is also something visually irresistible about losing control
Television is a visual medium.
Psychedelics give filmmakers permission to play.
Colours change.
Rooms stretch.
Faces distort.
Time slows down.
Sound becomes strange.
A normal hallway suddenly looks like a nightmare.
A familiar bedroom becomes an alien planet.
And television has become much better at making these sequences feel immersive.
The psychedelic episode is therefore not just a story break.
It is an opportunity for the director, editor, cinematographer and sound team to briefly throw every normal rule out of the window.
For an episode or two, the show gets to stop behaving like itself.
And that is probably why viewers remember these episodes.
You might forget episode six.
You will remember the one where everyone thought the ceiling was breathing.
But there is something slightly strange about how casually television treats drugs now
There is a line between depicting drug use and turning it into an aesthetic.
Modern television often walks directly across that line.
The characters take something.
Something goes wrong.
Everyone laughs.
They learn a life lesson.
Then the episode ends.
Real drug use is obviously more complicated than that.
But television is not a public health pamphlet.
It is interested in drama, comedy and character.
And psychedelics are dramatically useful because they create immediate uncertainty.
What is real?
What is imagined?
Who remembers what?
Did that actually happen?
Is the character hallucinating or has the writer simply decided that a raccoon is now an important supporting character?
That uncertainty is entertainment.
And maybe Gen Z is particularly suited to this kind of television
There is something very specific about watching young adults get high on television now.
The characters are often not rebellious teenagers.
They are twenty somethings with rent, jobs, relationship anxiety, family baggage and unread emails.
They are adults who are still figuring out how to be adults.
That makes the psychedelic episode less about rebellion and more about escape.
Nobody is trying to become a rock star.
They are trying to get through Tuesday.
Sometimes Tuesday requires LSD.
At least according to television.
The Adults episode makes this particularly obvious. The characters are already dealing with the absurdity of friendship and early adulthood before the drugs arrive. The psychedelic experience simply makes their existing chaos visible.
The raccoon is not really the point.
The point is what happens when a group of people who are already barely holding their lives together lose the ability to pretend that they are.
Maybe the psychedelic episode is the new bottle episode
For years, television had its bottle episode.
Put the characters in one room.
Give them one problem.
Make them talk.
The psychedelic episode does something similar, except instead of limiting the physical world, it destroys the rules of the psychological one.
It lets characters enter the strangest version of themselves.
And perhaps that is why the trope keeps surviving.
Because television is ultimately obsessed with one question:
What would happen if these people stopped behaving normally?
Give them a breakup and you get a relationship episode.
Give them a wedding and you get a family episode.
Give them a promotion and you get a workplace episode.
Give them a psychedelic and suddenly the lamp has feelings.
And honestly, television has always been a little bit about that lamp.
We watch because we want to see what happens when ordinary people are placed in extraordinary situations.
The psychedelic episode simply removes the final safety net.
Reality.
For 30 minutes, nobody knows what is happening.
Not the characters.
Not the audience.
Possibly not even the writers.
And somehow, that is exactly why we keep watching.