Rick and Morty

**Rick and Morty** is an American adult animated science fiction sitcom created by American voice actor and animator Justin Roiland and *Community* creator Dan Harmon exclusively for Cartoon Network's late-night programming block, Adult Swim, premiering on December 12, 2016.

The entire series so far was made avaliable at launch.

## **Premise**

*Rick and Morty* revolves around the adventures of the members of the Smith household, which consists of parents Jerry and Beth, their children Summer and Morty, and Beth's father, Rick Sanchez, who lives with them as a guest. The adventures of Rick and Morty, however, take place across an infinite number of realities, with the characters travelling to other planets and dimensions through portals and Rick's flying car.

## **Cast**

### Main Cast

* Justin Roiland as Rick Sanchez, Morty Smith
* Chris Parnell as Jerry Smith
* Sarah Chalke as Beth Smith
* Spencer Grammer as Summer Smith

## **Production**

### Development

*Rick and Morty* was created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. The duo first met at Channel 101, a non-profit monthly short film festival in Los Angeles co-founded by Harmon. At Channel 101, participants submit a short film in the format of a pilot, and a live audience decides which pilots continue as a series. Roiland, then a producer on reality programming, began submitting content to the festival a year after its launch, in 2004. His pilots typically consisted of shock value—"sick and twisted" elements that received a confused reaction from the audience. Nevertheless, Harmon took a liking to his humor and the two began collaborating.

### Conception

In 2006, Roiland was fired from working on a television series he regarded as intensely creatively stifling, and funneled his creative energies into creating a webisode for Channel 101. The result was *The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti*, an animated short starring parodies of Doc Brown and Marty McFly, characters from the *Back to the Future* film trilogy. In the short, which Harmon would dub "a bastardization, a pornographic vandalization", Doc Smith urges Mharti that the solution to all of his problems is to give him oral sex. The audience reacted to it wildly, and Roiland began creating more shorts involving the characters, which soon evolved beyond his original intentions and their obvious origin within the film from which it was culled. Harmon would later create and produce *Community*, an NBC sitcom, while Roiland would work primarily in voice acting for Disney's *Fish Hooks* and Cartoon Network's *Adventure Time*.

In 2012, Harmon was briefly fired from *Community*. Adult Swim, searching for a more prime-time, "hit" show, approached Harmon shortly afterward, who initially viewed the channel as unfit for his style. He also was unfamiliar with animation, and his process for creating television focuses more heavily on dialogue, characters, and story. Instead, he phoned Roiland to inquire if he had any ideas for an animated series. Roiland immediately brought up the idea of using the Doc and Mharti characters, renamed Rick and Morty. Roiland initially wanted the show's run time to consist of one eleven-minute segment, but Adult Swim pushed for a half-hour program. Harmon felt the best way to extend the voices into a program would be to build a family around the characters, while Adult Swim development executive Nick Weidenfeld suggested that Rick be Morty's grandfather. Having pitched multiple television programs that did not get off the ground, Roiland was initially very unreceptive to others attempting to give notes on his pitch. Prior to developing *Rick and Morty*, he had created three failed animated pilots for Fox, and he had begun to feel "burned out" with developing television.

The first draft was completed in six hours on the Paramount Pictures lot in Dan Harmon's unfurnished *Community* office. The duo had broken the story that day, sold the pilot, and then sat down to write. Roiland, while acknowledging a tendency for procrastination, encouraged Harmon to stay and write the entire first draft. "We were sitting on the floor, cross-legged with laptops and I was about to get up and go home and he said, 'Wait, if you go home, it might take us three months to write this thing. Stay here right now and we can write it in six hours.' He just had a premonition about that," recalled Harmon.  Adult Swim was initially unsure of Roiland doing both voices, partially due to the undeveloped nature of the character of Morty. Harmon wrote four short premises in which Morty took a more assertive role and sent it to Mike Lazzo. Adult Swim placed a tamer TV-14 rating on the program, which initially was met with reluctance from the show's staff. The network's reason behind the rating was that it would soon begin broadcasting in prime-time, competing with major programs.

The theme song for *Rick and Morty* by Ryan Elder was originally used in a rejected Cartoon Network pilot Roiland made called "Dog World", which was referenced in the episode "Lawnmower Dog".

### Release

The series has been picked up for an additional seventy episodes over an unspecified number of seasons. The fourth season premiered on November 10, 2019, and consists of ten episodes.

The series has been renewed for a fifth season on May 2020.

In the United Kingdom, public-service broadcaster Channel 4 outbid Netflix and began airing the series with season 4, which represents its first pickup by an international television channel. Season 4 was originally scheduled to premiere on Channel 4 in January 2020; viewer complaints resulted in the broadcaster moving the first episode forward to November 20 on E4.

In Canada, the series initially premiered on Adult Swim on January 10, 2016; and in Quebec, it premiered on Télétoon's Télétoon la nuit block on May 18, 2018.

## **Reception**

### Critical

*Rick and Morty* has received near-universal critical acclaim, holding an approval rating of 94% on review aggregator website *Rotten Tomatoes* for the entire series. David Weigand of *San Francisco Chronicle* described it as "offbeat and occasionally coarse... the take-away here is that it works". He praised the animation direction by James McDermott for being "fresh, colorful and as wacky as the script", and states that the series possesses "shades of *Futurama*, *South Park* and even *Beetlejuice*", ultimately opining that its humor felt "entirely original". Neil Genzlinger of The *New York Times* praised the series and stated that it was "Grandparenting at its unhinged finest." In a review shortly after the second-season premiere, Sean Sebastian of Junkee said that although the crude animation and over-the-top voice acting might have discouraged some viewers to continue watching, *Rick and Morty* is "exceptionally well-made" and that "the more you dissect it, the more you find it has to say."

Todd Spangler of *Variety* gave the series a lukewarm review; while he found the series was passable, he contrasted it with other Adult Swim series as "often seems overly reliant on simply being frenetic at the expense of being witty" and enjoyed it as "a welcome attempt to dream just a little bigger". David Sims of *The A.V. Club* gave the series an "A−". In reviewing the first two episodes, he complimented the animation for its "clean, simple style". He stated that while the series has "a dark, sick sensibility", he praised its "effort to give each character a little bit of depth", further applauding Roiland's voice talent for the eponymous characters.[

## **Trivia**

* On July 26, 2020, Toonami aired a second special *Rick and Morty* anime short, titled "Rick and Morty vs. Genocider", written and directed by Takashi Sano, director of the *Tower of God* anime series. The 8-minute, 15-second-long short features Japanese dialogue with English subtitles.
	+ Coincedentally, both shows are readily available to stream on HBO Max!