Earlier this month, “Rick and Morty” ended its third season as the top-rated show on its network, Adult Swim, and the most popular television comedy among viewers between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. The finale drew a total audience of 2.6 million people, all of whom were probably stoned, as befits an animated program given to cheerful nihilism, destabilizing farce, and demented noodling with the texture of space-time.

The show, with its action propelled by ideas about the souls of clones and the coexistence of parallel universes, addresses philosophy as earnestly as any science fiction by Jules Verne or Octavia Butler or Philip K. Dick, with the difference that “Rick and Morty” is less than completely sold on the rewards of earnestness and more than somewhat alive to the pleasures of shock. Everything within the realm of speculative fiction is on the table to be parodied and burlesqued, fondly alluded to and cruelly desecrated. The ground constantly shifts between, say, quick glances at quantum mechanics and lingering homages to the Scott Bakula show “Quantum Leap.” You get good, sly jokes about Erwin Schrödinger and good, dumb gags about “Forbidden Planet” all at once.

The hero, as it were, is Rick Sanchez, a mad genius voiced by the series’ co-creator Justin Roiland. The direct inspiration for “Rick and Morty” was the “Back to the Future” series, and the influence of Doc Brown is clear in Rick’s antic lankiness and receding bohemian coiffure. He is perpetually pulling a portal gun from his lab coat, in order to access an infinite number of alternative universes; or to visit another galaxy within the universe we call our own; or, in one instance, simply to enter a crosstown pizza place in order to grab two pies before closing time. Another pocket of the lab coat bears a flask, on which Rick pulls in order to self-medicate his terminal grouchiness and towering cynicism. Both within the show and within commentary on it, observers describe Rick as a sociopath, quite understandably. Because of his scientific acumen—he is capable of freezing time, for instance—he has the standing of a god, which tends to decrease his empathy and up the show’s body count. He’s not so much Dr. Who as Dr. WTF. He exists as a caricature of the TV-drama antihero, supremely competent and thoroughly maniacal.

Rick is situated, meanwhile, in a classic half-hour family comedy, populated by characters who learn and grow and stuff like that. In lieu of a proper mad-genius laboratory setup, he works in the suburban garage of a house owned by his daughter, Beth (voiced by Sarah Chalke), and her ineffectual husband, Jerry (Chris Parnell). Beth spends her days being defensive about working as a veterinarian and her evenings walking all over Jerry, which is easy. Their teen children—a daughter, Summer (Spencer Grammer), and a son, Morty (Roiland again)—are somehow more exciting in their mediocrity. The kindhearted worrywart Morty serves as Rick’s sidekick in his excursions across dimensions and to the limits of good taste.

This is a show on which learning and growing—the strengthening of filial bonds, the plumbing of inner depths—proceed, for instance, from a visit that Rick and Beth pay to Froopyland, a candy-bright fantasy world that he created for her in her childhood. The trip is motivated by a guilty desire to retrieve a neighborhood boy whom Beth had shunted to Froopyland, many years ago. The kid, Tommy, has sustained himself over the decades by mating with the cloyingly cute local fauna and eating his children—the inbred grotesqueness of whom is rendered with heart-stunning flair. It takes a lot these days to shock the bourgeois, but “Rick and Morty” manages to most weeks, in this instance by compelling the audience to imagine something on the order of defiling a Care Bear. The show harbors a hostility toward propriety, and even basic decency, for which the word “irreverent” will not suffice.

The metaverse themes synch well with the metatextual tendencies of the co-creator Dan Harmon, who is best known for fabricating the erstwhile NBC sitcom “Community,” a self-aware treat served to a cult of smart alecks. More than occasionally, Rick and Morty are meaningfully aware of themselves as characters on “Rick and Morty.” When, for instance, an episode’s plotline resolves with the characters openly acknowledging the existence of a deus ex machina, the show comes to resemble a successful effort by Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter of “Adaptation” and “Synecdoche, New York”) to adapt a book by Mark Leyner (the author of “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist” and “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack”).

In this way, the show supplies an artful answer to the question of what follows postmodernism: a decadent regurgitation of all its tropes, all at once, leavened by some humanistic wistfulness. I am not the first to note the thesis statement embedded in the eighth episode of the first season, when Morty (or, more precisely, an alternative-reality double) begs his older sister not to be distraught about her recent discovery that their parents’ miserable home life began at her unplanned conception: “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?”

Shortly after the Season 3 finale, “Rick and Morty” burbled into the broader pop-cultural consciousness by way of a fast-food promotional tie-in that has metastasized into I know not what. The Season 3 début had featured a scene in which Rick—touring his own memory as escorted by an insect-like agent of a sinister “Galactic Federation” that had taken over Earth and infiltrated his mind—pulled up to a McDonald’s drive-through. He wanted ten McNuggets, and he insisted on dipping them in a Szechuan sauce that had been briefly available, in 1998, during a promotion for the film “Mulan.” Rick explained to his chaperone, “This is the only place we’re gonna be able to try it, is in my memory.”

McDonald’s showed Roiland its appreciation by sending him a quantity of this prized condiment and, later, delivering similar jugs to a handful of fans. In early October, McDonald’s took the further step of preparing regular packets of the sauce for distribution in restaurants, and things fell apart. The corporation supplied its franchisees with far too few packets to meet the fanatic demand, and the good vibes of an improvised viral-marketing scheme soured like a Disneyland acid trip gone bad. Thousands of would-be Szechuan-sauce dippers had empty hands as they turned their backs on the golden arches. This week brings word that a “Rick and Morty” fan in Michigan has traded his Volkswagen Golf for one packet.

Peel back the foil top of that plastic dipping tin and taste a rich text: an organic tie-in about a corporate tie-in regarding a condiment for not-at-all-organic poultry. A point of contact between Disney, the leading name in family entertainment, and “Rick and Morty,” an animated property whose plots are too filthy to summarize in mixed company. The whole thing was entertainingly degenerate in an extremely American way, and it was wholly welcome for bringing the cleverness of “Rick and Morty” a bit of attention beyond its existing niche. But just a bit. In some parallel universe, the Szechuan-sauce story escalates into a ubiquitous craze. In ours, it burbles and fizzes and gives delight, but fails to pop amid the apocalyptic grind of recent news cycles, with grave tension at all turns. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.