In the last five years, Sanders Sides has become something like a cult show in the YouTube web series ambit, and it did so with the valiant approach of discussing mental health issues, sometimes as little talked about as intrusive thoughts or anxiety with a language that could be easily understood by all kinds of audiences, mixing it all with lots of comedy and relatable characters that have become beloved by its audience.
It's an inconvenience, though that as the popularity of the show went up, so did the goals of the production team and the pressure to offer a series that went on sattisfying their growing audience with the limited staff and resources they had. This resulted in long gaps between episodes and a portion of the audience becoming impatient over the long waits, sometimes of more than a year between episodes.
With the intention of filling this gap, this companion series was born. It was their intention to provide lighter content starring the Sanders Sides characters to make up for the waits between episodes, but right from the first entry, you can see it was going to be more ambitious than that. In fact, I'd dare to say that in just three episodes as of writing this, they've managed to surpass the original Sanders Sides in many ways.
Right from the first entry, the first difference with the original series became evident: the Sides and Thomas were no longer constrained to their fixed points in the living room where we only saw them from the wrist up, and we saw them instead in different situations in Thomas' daily life, like watching a movie, going to the mall, tidying and cleaning the house or going on a romantic date at the park. This change alone led to lots of innovation in the cinematography department, different situations, different production challenges and a higher level of quality in the scripts if it was possible to top the quality the scripts in the original series had.
We don't get the classic debates about mental health issues that are reserved for the main series, but that doesn't mean mental health isn't discussed, just that we see it discussed more organically as we live the characters' lives instead and feel through them everything they're going through instead of being talked about it by exposition like in the original series.
Some people have dismissed Sanders Asides as a gimmick that shouldn't even be considered canon. I strongly disagree, first because the team has already said that Sanders Asides episodes should be taken just as regular Sanders Sides episodes in terms of series plot, encouraging to watch them chronologically as they're published as if they were part of Sanders Sides. Secondly because by doing so, they're missing a show that gives a breath of fresh air to the Sanders Sides universe, a very nice complement to the original series that deserves the same recognition the original series has. To be honest, it deserves even more recognition as it dares to cross boundaries the original series still hasn't tried to cross at this point, although we still don't know what the future has in store for both shows.
