We already know that grandpas can be bad, thanks to “Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa,” a Johnny Knoxville movie released in October in which an old man does all kinds of psychic damage to his 8-year-old grandson. But that bad grandpa was a model citizen compared with the bad grandpa in “Rick and Morty,” a blistering, demented animated series that begins Monday night on Adult Swim.

This grandpa, the Rick of the title, is a mad-scientist genius who, as the pilot opens, is preparing to wipe out humanity and leave his grandson, Morty, to repopulate the earth with Jessica, a high school classmate whom Morty lusts after although she is way out of his league. What teenage boy wouldn’t welcome that prospect? But Morty is a reluctant and usually terrified companion on this adventure and all the others Rick drags him on.

Rick is contemptuous of school and thinks nothing of whisking Morty out of it to accompany him on sci-fi excursions to places populated by creatures that look like what you’d get if the things in the “Star Wars” cantina scene were to interbreed. But Rick is also prone to tinkering with the earthbound status quo.

In a later episode, when the family dog urinates on the carpet, and Morty’s father (the voice of Chris Parnell) asks if there’s a way to make the animal not be so stupid, Rick comes up with a contraption that endows the dog with sentience and allows it to speak. The result is must viewing for dog owners everywhere. That the episode also turns into an elaborate riff on the movie “Inception” testifies to the audaciousness of this inventive series.