Justin Roiland

Rick Sanchez belches in the middle of a word and carries on as if nothing happened. Morty stammers, gets two syllables in, and is talked over. For most of Rick and Morty (2013) both voices came out of Justin Roiland, and the rhythm of the programme, two people never letting each other finish, was the rhythm of one man riffing against himself in a booth. He kept the takes that went wrong. "My big thing is outtakes as 'in-takes'," he told an interviewer in 2017, and you can hear it: the slur, the false start, the sentence that gives up halfway.

He came to it through the Channel 101 short-film festival in Los Angeles, where he had been making shorts from 2004 and where he met Dan Harmon. One of those shorts, The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti (2006), already had the premise and the voices; Rick and Morty arrived in December 2013 as the cleaned-up version, with Roiland co-creating, writing, directing episodes and voicing both leads. In 2020 he and others made Solar Opposites, in which he wrote and voiced Korvo, another alien with no patience for anyone slower than himself. His association with both series ended in 2023, and in the later seasons of Rick and Morty Rick and Morty are voiced by Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden.

What works is the naturalism. Most animated comedy is recorded clean and cut to the beat; Roiland's people sound like they are actually in the garage, drunk, interrupting. We laughed at Rick more than we have laughed at almost anything drawn, in those first two seasons, and it was the voice that did it: a genius running over the ends of everyone else's sentences because he has already worked out what they were going to say. What works less well is that the trick does not go very far. The criticism that he has a small number of core voices and rings changes on them is fair, and it gets fairer the longer you listen. Rick and Korvo are cousins. By the later seasons of Rick and Morty, which we found patchier and fonder of their own reflection, we caught ourselves listening to one performer doing two people rather than to two people.

Harmon is the collaborator who matters. The structure, the sitcom bones under the sci-fi, the family in the kitchen that gives Rick's contempt something to land on: those are shared work, and the show is at its best when the writing holds the voice to a story rather than letting it wander.

The programme went on without him, and we noticed for an episode and then stopped. That is a compliment to Cardoni and Belden. It says rather more about how much of Rick was always on the page.