courtesy Adult Swim
Disappointed in the lackluster crop of new fall shows on network TV? You should be. Luckily, there’s a solution to your woes. Abandon the quiet desperation of reloading Hulu for something new and try one of the best shows from last year instead: Rick and Morty. It’s a brilliant, madcap animated series about a sociopathic mad scientist and his dim-witted grandson traipsing through alternate dimensions, alien worlds and—in one very special Christmas episode—the internal organs of a homeless man. Who doesn’t want to watch hours of that?
Co-created by Community showrunner Dan Harmon and animator Justin Roiland (who also voices both Rick and Morty), the Adult Swim series is a buddy comedy loosely inspired by the two main characters of Back to the Future. In practice, however, it’s something far more: a clever, often disturbing stew of sci-fi tropes that vacillates between cartoonish absurdity, profound existential darkness, and surprisingly humanistic moments of suburban family life. Here are six reasons you should binge-watch your way through the first season of the show—out today on DVD and Blu-ray—and why you should eagerly anticipate the show’s return for Season 2 next year.
It’s a Back to the Future Parody That Started as a Filthy Cartoon
So how did a Back to the Future parody become a cult favorite Adult Swim show? It all started with Channel 101, the short-film festival co-founded by Harmon for which Roiland made a “really filthy cartoon” [link NSFW] that involved him doing rather poor impressions of Doc and Marty that he eventually grew to love. “Over the years, I kept trying to plug them into different projects, and when Dan called me and said Adult Swim wanted to make a show, it was the first thing I pitched him,” Roiland says. “But [Rick and Morty] is a complete departure from the original short I made … We didn’t want to just think of this as a Back to the Future thing. I was like, ‘No time travel.’ The designs are reminiscent, but psychologically, I perceive them as something completely different from their origins.”
Yet, No Matter How Dark It Gets, Its Characters Still Seem Human
Part of the pleasure (and shock) of Rick and Morty is the jet-black humor that runs through the veins of the series. (In one episode, for example, Morty’s parents explore their own alternate lives with VR helmets to discover whether they’d be happier if they’d aborted their eldest child.) But as the show goes on, what really makes it gel are the unexpectedly human relationships that emerge around those moments of horror and pathos. Dishing out too much darkness without an glimpse of humanity would be “an abuse of the senses,” says Harmon. “It’s not realistic to watch [a show] for so much of your time without seeing evidence of something that you have inside you, something that connects us all,” he continues. “People are horrible to each other, and we have the capacity to think thoughts so big that they dwarf us. We can react to that in really animalistic ways and become even crueler than when we woke up, or we can unexpectedly find ourselves doing really selfless, strange things because something inside of us wants other people to be happy. It’s all part of the human psychosis.”
Rick’s (Possibly) Sociopathic Behavior
The most disturbing moments in the show tend to revolve around Rick, and the seemingly callous and occasionally murderous things he does during his adventures with Morty. (Within the first minute of the pilot, for example, we find him drunkenly flying over a city in a hovercraft, threatening to drop a neutrino bomb that will wipe out humanity.) Admittedly, when you’re constantly flitting between infinite realities and killing alternate versions of yourself and your loved ones, human life can start to seem a little cheap. So, is Rick actually a sociopath, or just a big picture kinda guy?
Dan Harmon at this year’s Comic-Con International. Ben Rasmussen/WIRED
“I’m not a qualified professional, but we’ve seen several instances of Rick reacting instantly on an empathic level,” Harmon says. “If [his granddaughter] Summer were mauled to death by aliens, I don’t picture Rick falling to his knees and cradling her eviscerated body and crying to the sky, ‘Why, dear God, why?’ I picture him kind of staring blankly at her corpse and doing whatever he can to replace her so her parents don’t notice. Sociopaths are playing life like a videogame, and they don’t really know the difference between right and wrong. I think Rick is a very convicted anarchist, and he plays in a much bigger world that makes individual life and individual people’s emotions feel justifiably meaningless to him.”
The Suicidal Character They Keep Trying to Add to the Series
One of the most popular characters of the first season is Mr. Meeseeks, a smiling, blue creature summoned by a wish-granting box that desires only to fulfill its assigned task—and then blink out of existence forever. (If it can’t, well, let’s just say things go horribly awry.) But Harmon says there’s another self-destructive secondary character they keep trying to fit into the show. “There’s a guy we keep joking about putting in the show, because he made us laugh so hard, called Mr. Always Wants to Be Hunted—he’s got a target on his chest and he runs around saying, ‘Somebody hunt me!’” says Harmon. “He’s the bane of a galaxy full of rich people who hunt people for sport. When he shows up to those places, he gets kicked out, because it’s no fun if the guy actually wants to be hunted.”
The Great Mystery of Morty’s Grandmother
Over the course of the series, We’ve met nearly every member of the Smith family—except for Rick’s wife. So where is Morty’s grandmother? According to Harmon, it’s something they’ve given a lot of thought, but not something they’re ready to reveal any time soon. “We don’t want to willfully withhold, but I think that characters need to be real for you to be invested. In real life, you find out these little details about the people you know in no specific order,” he says. “I do think it would be a mistake to reveal at some point that his heart was broken. We’ve touched on that whole Mr. Freeze concept, that his wife is tied up in his origins. But the problem with that is that once you say, ‘Oh the reason he’s like this is because of that old spaghetti incident’—then he’s the spaghetti guy forever, he’s not Rick.”
The Second Season Will Be More Sci-Fi Than Suburban
Although the first season was largely split between sci-fi adventures (like the fantastic Inception parody episode, “Lawnmower Dog”) and familial squabbles, Harmon says Season 2 will focus more on the former—simply because it’s more entertaining. “We’re going to be 10 to 15 percent more galactic this season, and less pure domestic B-stories,” he says. “For better or for worse, we started to have more fun in the writers’ room when we started talking about … sci-fi stuff. It’s still domestic in a moral or thematic way, though. [Morty's parents] go to couples therapy in space. There, I said it. [Laughs] The show will be a little more vast, and less once upon a time, there was a house and one guy in the house was always up to something. It’s more like, the universe is a really big place. And we’ll find out if it’s a good or bad thing.”
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