The Adult Swim cartoon about a mad scientist and his grandson has become a cult favourite. The men behind it unveil the secrets of its success

Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty looked like a consolation prize at first: Harmon had lost his spot at the head of his groundbreaking (but low-rated) NBC sitcom Community, which he’d created, and had gone from the biggest broadcaster on the dial to avant-garde cable comedy network Adult Swim. He created the new show with Justin Roiland, who’d worked with Harmon in the digital cartoons workshop Channel 101.



The show follows Rick, a mad scientist who goes to live with his daughter and her family after his wife dies, and regularly gets his not-that-bright grandson Morty involved in “high-concept sci-fi rigamarole”, to use the show’s phrase.

But when Rick and Morty aired, it wasn’t just a hit for Adult Swim – it occasionally punched so far above its weight that it got better ratings than Community. Now, it’s Harmon’s primary writing project, with Roiland writing alongside him, providing the voices for the title characters and directing much of the design.

The show’s Channel 101 precursor was called Doc and Mharti, and while the creators changed the name to avoid angry lawyers, the cartoon kept the galaxy-hopping sitcom grounded in the mad-scientist-educates-innocent-kid conceit of any number of favourite TV shows – but they did darken it considerably.

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Are you glad to be back?1

We’re very excited.

Morty’s getting wiser and Rick’s having feelings – what happens as these characters develop?

Harmon: Well, we try to balance it all with the permanence of cynicism. As we continue, hopefully we see more and more hints that Rick, like any human being, in the spur of the moment, has feelings for other individuals, especially Morty. But we’d like to think that it’s always going to be undercut by the bigger picture, which is that Rick is unmistakably, kind of sociopathically disconnected. He’s got bigger fish to fry, always. Hopefully that’s not a shark that’s capable of being jumped.

You said before it launched that you thought Rick and Morty could go for 10 seasons. Do you still feel like you can sustain it for that long? The Community mantra was “six seasons and a movie”.2

Harmon: I absolutely still feel that way. That’s what I really like about the show, and about animation. The Simpsons3 has just remained The Simpsons – they’re kind of frozen in time. I think that our show’s a little bit different than that. I do think that there’ll be a little bit of a linear change – I don’t want to just force stasis.

It’s a tough one. I want the show to stay fresh for ever, and I think it’s more possible with this show than anything.



Why is that?

Harmon: One of the first things that might corner you in a different show would be really logic-based plot points, and our show comes out of the gate very liberated from logic.

Roiland: Also, it’s animated, you know? They don’t age.

Justin, where do the monster designs come from? You guys have these long sequences where there are three dozen aliens scrolling past the frame and they’re all really complex.

Roiland: We have an incredible design team on the show, led by a guy named James McDermott. I definitely will contribute – there are times in the writers’ room where I’m doodling stuff that finds its way into the show in a much more souped-up way as it filters through our design team. For a particular sequence in the second episode, I was just like, “Go nuts. Design a bunch of aliens.” Now we have 12 really cool alien designs.



You guys have a pretty strong guest star lineup. Is that Jemaine Clement as Fart4 in the second episode?

Roiland: Yeah, he was amazing. He was in New Zealand when we recorded him at a studio. I would love to have more of him.

Community is upbeat and Rick and Morty is about all the hard things.

Harmon: Community is a celebration of the species. I mean, Community’s enemy is a system that lets us not like ourselves and each other. Because that’s what a sitcom does; it fills you with a sense of family, and I wanted to do that in a healthy way that didn’t feel like working for the government, even though I was writing a sitcom.

When you’re watching animation, it’s colourful and it has automatic connections to innocence and childhood. With Community, I’m counterbalancing the Orwellian pacification of a sitcom with messages of humanity, which is subversive in that medium. In animation, what’s subversive is dealing with life and its harshness. The inspiration that we share on the writing staff comes from places like Willy Wonka and Dr Seuss and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and things that seemed to respect us as children as though we were adults, that had a hint of cynicism and allowed us to actually overcome stuff that we were going to grapple with in adulthood.

That’s a very heady answer that sounds as if I plan everything when I get up in the morning, but that’s my instinct when I go into any medium, is to create contrasts.

Do you guys say to yourselves, “Here’s a fun story structure about high school romance – I think we’re gonna rip it apart this week?”5

Yes. Everybody on the Rick and Morty staff does that together. We talk about our favorite sci-fi tropes, and we pull the panels off of them and see where the batteries are. Can we swap these out for bigger batteries? Will that make it more powerful, or will that make it blow up? What is the typical message of this plot device – is it that true love will find you in the end? Let’s use this device for something else.

We just sit there and go, “OK: x-ray glasses. What is the typical message of a story about x-ray glasses? It’s that you don’t want to know everything – it’s possible to know too much and you won’t be happy. Is that a message that the system tells us because they don’t want us to be empowered? OK, wouldn’t it be funny if we told an x-ray glasses story where the x-ray glasses were a huge help?” We just make each other laugh by pulling apart the wires.



What took you guys so long to come back?



Roiland: It’s kind of boring, it just has to do with budget and schedule. The golden rule in animation is you pick two of the three – good, fast and cheap. We opted for good and cheap.



You’ve talked a lot about keeping things the same. What’s changing?

Harmon: You get some neat glimpses of Rick from new angles. We meet an ex-lover of his. We widen the galaxy a little bit and establish a few easily broken rules about how the galaxy really works. There are more interesting insights into what makes the dynamics between specific characters tick.

That’s the tricky thing about Morty: he’s very specifically going through puberty. Bart Simpson is 10 years old, Lisa is eight – do research and pretend I got those numbers right [he did] – but they’re not pubescent.

They can do a story about Bart falling in love with a teacher but it’s easier to be locked permanently in pre-adolescence than it is to be locked permanently in this very specific transition phase. However, our show kind of celebrates that. If it’s gonna work, Morty is gonna be eternally in puberty. I guess the difference is, in real life, puberty ends. But also, it’s such a dramatic time that it seems like it lasts for ever and every day you feel like you’re having another epiphany.

Is there a limited number of world-widening experiences Morty can have before he stops being Morty? That’s a crucial question and we should probably leave it unanswered.

Is there a particular work of science fiction guys consistently go back to?

Harmon: I’m always falling back on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – the trilogy of books. That was my Harry Potter when I was in middle school. No matter what we do, I’m always finding myself remembering some detail from that book series to illustrate a point I’m trying to make as we talk about how the galaxy works and what it’s like to be out there as a human being.

Justin?

Roiland: Just the Bible. The Holy Bible. There’s a lot of Bible in our show. There’s a whole episode where we really get to the bottom of Leviticus.6 It’s controversial, but we somehow thread that needle.

I’m looking forward to that one.

Footnotes

1 Adult Swim’s shows are widely acclaimed, but irregularly scheduled – Rick and Morty’s first season premiered on 3 December 2013. Its second season premiered on Sunday.

2 Harmon’s NBC sitcom, from which he was fired after the third season, rehired after a disastrous fourth, and was cancelled after the fifth. The sixth (and probably final) season was a Yahoo Screen exclusive, though they kept the length and the budget. Its fans adopted the hashtag #sixseasonsandamovie in tribute to one character’s love for another ill-fated NBC show, The Cape. No word on a movie.

3 Rick and Morty crossed over very briefly with The Simpsons earlier this year. It didn’t go well for The Simpsons.

4 Jemaine Clement, co-creator of musical sitcom Flight of the Conchords and vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, plays a sentient gas not too far removed from his David Bowie impression.

5 Rick and Morty’s season one love-potion-hijinks-at-school episode ends with everyone in the world mutated into repulsive monsters called “Cronenbergs”.