Among a certain breed of sci-fi/comedy/animation nerd, there were very few cultural events in 2017 more exciting than the prospect of finally getting new episodes of the acclaimed Adult Swim show Rick and Morty. Created by Justin Roiland and the cultishly adored Dan Harmon (Sidenote: No, really. Harmon’s fans veer to a, uh, Wicker Man-ish, intensity), Ricky & Morty ended its second season waaaaaaaaaaaay back in October 2015, closing the run with a shocking series of reveals and cliffhangers, then directly taunting the audience about how long the wait was going to be for new episodes.
And, indeed, fans had to wait. And wait. And wait some more. But the show is now back and in full swing. The premiere was surprise-released on April 1, and the season proper has been chugging along for a few weeks now. We’re currently four episodes deep into a ten-episode season and so far it’s been…fine. Pretty good. Generally funny.
But somewhere along the way, the balance struck by the two previous seasons seems to have been lost, and there’s a feeling this year that the show is simply…off, somehow.
There’s a few reasons why this might be. But first, a quick refresher:
Rick and Morty follows the adventures of Rick (voiced by Roiland), an impossibly brilliant mad scientist who galavants around the multiverse with a portal gun, a seemingly bottomless appetite for drugs and booze, and a bad attitude, and his derpy grandson Morty (Roiland again). Together they stumble through pretty much every sci-fi trope and set-up imaginable across an infinite multiverse of chaos and madness.
Also in the mix is Morty’s emotionally constipated mom Beth (Sarah Chalke), weak-willed father Jerry (Chris Parnell), and big sister Summer (Spencer Grammer). Over the course of its first two seasons, Rick and Morty used the tropes it was exploiting to deconstruct its genre, its stories, and even the tropes themselves, all the while using those same tropes for their original purpose, i.e. using fantastical narrative devices to dramatize complex emotional matters (such as Jerry and Beth visiting an off-world marriage counseling service where their monstrous pre-conceptions of each other were given physical form).
Many times those deconstructions involved hundreds if not thousands of people and aliens being brutally killed in gruesome fashion, but that’s neither here nor there.
Throughout its initial run, the central question teased out was not one of mythology or world-building, but around the character of Rick himself. While Rick frequently struck a detached, nihilistic pose, the show frequently prodded the viewer with a reminder that the pose was, well, a pose. For all his claims of intellectual detachment, Rick could still have his heart broken and fall into deep states of depression. For all his insistence that he cared about no one, he was still willing at times to sacrifice himself for Morty and a select few others. Rick was a destructive, often-sociopathic personality, but the show seemed engaged with the question as to the limits of that detachment. Season 2 ended by attacking this head-on, with Rick’s actions leading to a galactic empire colonizing earth and leaving his daughter and her family as fugitives. Rick shocked the other characters (and the viewer at home) by taking ownership of his mess and surrendering to the authorities. Trent Reznor wept-sang over somber images of Rick’s imprisonment, leaving the viewer to wonder if the show had just completely upended all of its narrative tenets and opening itself up to an entirely new future.
Nah.
Instead, the premiere of season three quickly un-pivots away from this moment of character growth and change and instead reveals that Rick’s surrender was part of long-con master plan to destroy all his enemies and remove Jerry from the family. The premiere ended with Rick triumphant, gleefully asserting to Morty both that he truly did not give a shit about anybody but himself and that the season to follow would constitute the “darkest year of our adventures yet.”
It’s a pretty terrific gag to kick off a season, subverting expectations while also reasserting the core identity of the show. Unless Roiland and Harmon intended on completely overhauling Rick and Morty, they were going to have to bust Rick out and clear Earth of its intergalactic overlords. The premiere accomplished both goals with aplomb, and the exiling of Jerry from the family means that they didn’t completely hit the reset button.
And yet, as more episodes have been released, it increasingly feels like the premiere has left the writers with nowhere to go when it comes to Rick. Having more or less completely resolved whether or not Rick cares or is capable or repentance (spoiler: No, and, he isn’t), Rick and Morty is instead now caught in a narrative cycle where characters keep explaining and re-explaining Rick’s psychological make-up to him, each other, and to us, going around and around and reiterating the same character points without ever actually developing things further.
(Sidenote: The premiere twists and subsequent episodes have also basically established Rick as a boozed-up god, consistently 50 steps ahead of every other character and never in any real danger. The Rick of season one was a genius, but he could still trip over himself and be blindsided, with one early, shocking episode finding him and Morty abandoning their home dimension after he screws up so much that he can’t fix it. The current incarnation of the character possesses no such weaknesses.)
But if you watched Dan Harmon’s Community, these problems aren’t surprising. They are almost beat-for-beat the same shoals that the earlier show ran into in its own third season.
As a writer, Dan Harmon is very, very good at epiphanies. What he’s not so strong at, if Rick and Morty and Community are any example, is figuring out ways to dramatize and depict characters actually taking those epiphanies and making real, tangible choices as a result of them.
What I think it comes down to is that Harmon has a writer’s desire to tear apart the worlds he has built, but a TV producer’s pragmatic understanding that a show should run for as long as humanly possible. On Community, multiple characters were on emotional/narrative trajectories that should by all rights have taken them away from the community college at the center of the show. But that would have meant Community ending/changing in a fundamental way, and so instead the characters kept learning the same lessons over and over again.
The problem was only magnified by the deconstructionist streak running through Harmon’s work. One of Community’s most frequent narrative ploys was for the study group at the center of the show to bicker amongst themselves and consider breaking up as a group, only to reaffirm their bond through a climatic speech by Joel McHale’s Jeff Winger. The writers went to this well so often that by the end of season two they were mocking themselves on how frequently they played this card. And then, and this is the important part, they kept doing it even after making fun of how often they did it.
But maybe no Community arc better illustrates this tendency than the handling of Chevy Chase’s Pierce Hawthorne in season two. Pierce, long a Chevy Chase-esque asshole, became an almost completely irredeemable villain in the season’s second half, at one point even going so far as to verbally assault a suicidal teenager the other characters were trying to help cope through a depressive moment. In the season’s climax, the other members of the study group considered kicking him out of the group, fed up with his behavior. Pierce ultimately came through and saved the school during an epic paintball game (Sidenote: Community was a weird show) only to reject the group’s invitation to rejoin.
Then the next season started and Pierce immediately rejoined the study group. Reset.
Characters existing in a state of stasis is nothing new to TV, especially sitcoms, which will bleed a status quo out for a decade-plus if the cast is willing and the syndication checks clear. But Harmon’s (Sidenote: I’m talking about Dan Harmon specifically here, but that shouldn’t preclude the importance of Justin Roiland as one of the key voices of Rick and Morty [as well as being the actual literal voices of Rick and Morty] or the teams of writers and producers who create these shows. This article is just about commonalities between two shows of which Harmon is the main, public link) shows aspire to more than that. Both Community and Rick and Morty aren’t aiming for passive, forgettable pleasure that will go in one ear and out the other. They are shows that aspire to comment on everything from the dregs of popular culture to the human condition of morality and mortality, and I think those big aspirations are a part of why the fandom for both shows becomes so rabid so quickly.
But at a certain point, that resistance to growth and change, coupled with the self-referential edge, results in shows that begin to devour themselves. And when that happens, Harmon and his teams seem to lose track as to what people like about the show and lean harder and harder on attention-getting schtick. For Community that meant more and more parody episodes plus a greater emphasis on Ken Jeong’s psychotic Ben Chang, while for Rick and Morty that has meant more and more parody episodes (the second episode was a Mad Max parody, the third episode was a Die Hard parody, the fourth episode was a superhero parody about how superheroes are egotistical and stupid [the most blazing hot take 1985 has to offer]) plus a greater emphasis on grotesque violence.
None of which makes either show ‘bad’ necessarily. Some of Community’s absolute best episodes came from this later period (and its final season is end-to-end brilliant) and Rick and Morty continues to be entertaining each week. But even still, there’s a certain light, a certain humanity, that gets lost in the mix.
A couple weeks back, “Pickle Rick” aired. In the episode, Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of family therapy but inadvertently winds up stumbling through a bizarre (and insanely gory) adventure. The episode intercuts Rick’s nonsensical odyssey with scenes from the therapy session where the doctor (Susan Sarandon) immediately and easily gets to the root of what is plaguing this family. Beth is hostile and defensive, Morty and Summer are more-or-less resigned to the denial that grips their family, and Rick is, again, a pickle. The episode climaxes with a maimed Rick arriving at the therapy session and immediately launching into a rant against therapy in general and this therapist specifically. Sarandon’s doctor lets him speak his piece and then hits him with this monologue:
“Rick. The only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family, is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it is your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk, to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe. And yet, you are dripping with rat’s blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy. The same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is — it’s NOT an adventure — There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just… work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.”
It’s a great speech. Sarandon delivers the hell out of it. And it sets up a pretty remarkable punchline for the next scene when, while driving away from the office, Rick and Beth opt to laugh off the doctor’s points and make plans to go drink away their pain, while a horrified Morty and Summer watch in the back seat. The episode drew a good deal of attention and spawned at least one terrific essay about therapy and mental health.
But in terms of drama, in terms of character, it comes across as so much empty noise. Because one character point-blank explaining to another character their greatest faults and foibles means nothing if the next episode is just going to have everyone re-explain the same lesson (and indeed, the next episode was about Morty being shocked/angered to learn that Rick doesn’t give a shit about him. Again). Plenty of television programs have found rich dramatic weight in characters who refuse to change, from Seinfeld to Mad Men. But where something like Seinfeld wrung dark laughs out of the inescapable loop its heroes’ neuroses, and where Mad Men delved deep into a damaged soul to examine precisely why it fought change persistently, and why that stance eventually became unmanageable and destructive, Rick and Morty (and Community before it) seems to be under the impression that simply pointing out an issue is the same thing as dramatizing it, and that proposition feels thinner and thinner with each passing episode.
The caveat that should underline all this is that Harmon is a smart guy, Roiland is a smart guy, they are surrounded by smart writers and smart producers and smart animators and smart etc., and this may all be part of a larger arc that will pay off spectacularly in the season’s back-half or in the seasons to come.
But Harmon’s track record with exactly this has me concerned. If Community is an indication, the show will keep pushing Rick’s asshole-ish nature, then backtrack, then push it further, then backtrack, and so on and so forth until the show fades away.
When you circle around the same character’s same flaws over and over again, the character doesn’t just become unlikable, they become uninteresting. You can look up as many colorful ways of describing an asshole as you like, at the end of the day, it’s still an asshole.