“I'll go, ‘I ate a cupcake today,’ and they're like, ‘Stop eatin’ cupcakes and write the fuckin’ show, you piece of shit!’ ” Dan Harmon rants, exaggerating only slightly the kinds of tweets he gets from “15-year-olds.” In Harmon's rants, his fans—equal parts acolyte and troll—are always 15. And they are always demanding more Rick and Morty.

But right now, his hit show isn't in production. At the moment, Harmon is on a stage inside his Burbank studio, taping a new episode of his podcast Harmontown, venting about yet another thing he's said that's caused yet another frenzy. “It can be challenging, especially with crippling lazy alcoholism, to write a show that hasn't been ordered by a network,” he snarked back at one of those fans two days ago. It spawned a litany of “Rick and Morty in limbo” headlines this morning—all because, Harmon says, this generation lacks the shame to shut up.

“America, can't you stop fucking commenting on everything?” Harmon shouts to the citizens of Harmontown who come to hear their self-appointed mayor give them shit, doing all this commenting just to get his attention. (I will later find this out for myself when I pop up in one of Harmon's Instagram videos, where I'm welcomed with “Who's that bitch?” Harmontown TripAdvisor rating: two stars, would not recommend.)

In defense of those 15-year-old assholes, any delay in Rick and Morty seems inexplicable, so it must be Harmon's fault. You probably first heard of Dan Harmon from his beloved, perpetually endangered NBC sitcom, Community, where he garnered an unusually devoted following for a showrunner—then articles, then a pink slip, after he had his crew chant “Fuck you, Chevy” at Chevy Chase during a wrap party, then played a Harmontown audience the voice mail where Chase berated him for doing it. This earned Harmon a reputation: Difficult. Tormented. Forty-five-year-old asshole.

But Harmon bounced back with the thing he's being hassled about now: Rick and Morty, the Adult Swim show that wrapped its third season as TV's most popular comedy among millennials, besting even just-leave-it-on juggernauts like The Big Bang Theory, capturing the Zeitgeist in a way not seen since South Park. Rick and Morty’s success is as unlikely as Harmon's rebound—a crude, nihilistic cartoon about an alcoholic scientist and his naive grandson wreaking havoc across space-time, from a writer with a reputation for his own vodka-fueled tyranny. And while it might be more famous for a fan base that seems to be birthed from the darkest id of the Internet, the show's even earned prestige, becoming what Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss tell me is “our generation's most powerful exploration of what it means to be a person in this universe.”

Not bad for what started as a vulgar Back to the Future parody that Harmon's creative partner, Justin Roiland, first drew for Harmon's L.A. film festival, Channel 101, way back in 2006. Six years later, when Adult Swim approached Harmon just after he was fired from Community, he turned to Roiland, who suggested they revive the characters. This time they would be grandfather and grandson.

Dan Harmon Talks About Rick and Morty's Next 70 Episodes In Harmon's first interview since Rick and Morty got renewed, the creator tells GQ what it's like to feel happy for the first time and when we can expect new episodes.

Rick and Morty's dysfunctional world was rounded out with other family and an ever expanding cast of bird-people, sentient farts, and a top-hat-wearing sausage-shaped guy named Mr. Poopybutthole. Somehow, Rick and Morty makes you care about all of them. (Especially Mr. Poopybutthole.) Meanwhile, the acerbic, alcoholic scientist/grandfather Rick drags Morty across alien terrains and through dimensional portals, using superpowered intellect to dick around the multiverse, too in love with his own genius to care about the damage he's inflicting on his loved ones, or entire civilizations.