Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s comedy about a drunk genius and his frightened grandson is fast, cruel and at first as clever as anything on television. Later it grows fond of its own reflection, but the good episodes earn an evening.
Rick Sanchez is a scientist who has moved into his daughter’s house, taken over the garage and treats the rest of the universe as a place to run errands. He drinks from a flask, belches through his sentences and has no patience with anyone slower than himself, which is everyone. His grandson Morty is fourteen, frightened of most things and the only person Rick will take along. Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland built Rick and Morty on that pairing in 2013, and for its first two seasons it was the sharpest animated comedy on television. It has run to nine seasons, and the later ones are patchier. We recommend it, with the caveat that it does not stay as good as it starts.
Each episode runs about 22 minutes and carries two stories. Rick drags Morty to a planet where something goes wrong within ninety seconds, and back in the kitchen Jerry (Chris Parnell) and Beth (Sarah Chalke) work through a marriage that cannot survive contact with anything outside it. Summer (Spencer Grammer) starts as the sister who rolls her eyes and grows into the family member most like her grandfather. The editors, Lee Harting, Nick Reczynski and Ken MacKenzie among them, cut the adventures so tightly that a plot which would fill a feature is done before the halfway point. Ryan Elder’s score is thin, wobbly synthesiser, on purpose, and it sets the mood more than the pictures do.
The pictures are ugly by design. Directors including Wes Archer, Bryan Newton and Juan Jose Meza-Leon draw the humans as pale, rubbery figures with dots for eyes, and the aliens as things that drip. The portals are rings of sick green. In the first episode Rick takes Morty to another dimension to collect seeds from a tree, Morty falls and breaks both legs, and Rick stands over him deciding whether the errand is still worth it. We laughed at the legs, and then we saw that Rick’s face had not moved, and we stopped. The show does this often. It wants you to enjoy his cruelty and then catch yourself enjoying it, and in the early years it manages both in one breath.
Roiland voiced both leads. Rick’s speech is a slurred rush that runs over the ends of other people’s sentences, Morty’s is a stammer trying to get a word in, and the rhythm of the programme is the two of them failing to let each other finish. In later seasons the roles pass to Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden, and the join is closer than we expected; you notice for an episode and then stop. Parnell’s Jerry is the most sustained performance in the series, a man whose every line is a plea for approval he knows will not come. Werner Herzog turns up as an alien called Shrimply Pibbles and plays it entirely straight, which is the right choice.
The trouble arrives when the show realises how clever it is. From about the third season, Rick stops being a character who happens to believe nothing matters and becomes a spokesman for the idea, and the writers have him explain the joke and then explain that explaining the joke is the joke. The Smiths’ marriage is broken and mended so many times that we stopped believing in either state. The tic of the two leads saying each other’s names over and over was a joke about lazy writing and slowly became lazy writing. The writers’ room is enormous, and it shows both ways: Mike McMahan, Ryan Ridley, Jessica Gao and Jeff Loveness have written episodes as good as anything in the first year, and the same room has produced ones that are a chase with a lecture attached.
Harmon’s Community took a sitcom apart and rebuilt it every week; this is the same trick with a science-fiction kit, and it has lasted longer because the kit is bigger. Against Futurama, the obvious comparison, it is meaner and funnier and likes its universe less. Most critics rate it a little higher than we do, and they are largely reviewing the first two seasons. So, if we are honest, are we.
It carries a 15 certificate and earns it. Watch the first season in order, one episode a night, because the speed is tiring in bulk. If you are not laughing by the fourth episode, nothing later will change your mind. If you are, ration the rest and forgive it when it wanders; the writers usually notice and come back.
