What’s the show about? Well … somewhere in a dreaming suburban slab of Simpsons-esque tract housing lives the Smith family. Jerry is the hapless and bad-joke-making husband; Beth is his pissed-off veterinarian wife, thwarted by marriage, motherhood, the whole thing; Summer is their teenage-daughterish teenage daughter; and little 14-year-old Morty, quaking and pubescing and desiring and saying “Aw jeez,” is their son. And then there’s Rick—Rick Sanchez, Beth’s formerly estranged alcoholic father, now back in the nest. Rick is an old-school mad scientist: lab coat, pipe-cleaner legs, blue-gray corona of boffin hair. Out in the garage, he delivers lectures and harangues sideways while squinting into the circuitry of a time machine or unscrewing a ray gun. “The universe is basically an animal that grazes on the ordinary,” he explains. “It creates infinite idiots just to eat them.”

Rick started life, deep in the germinal phases of Rick and Morty, as a scabrous parody of “Doc” Brown from Back to the Future. But he’s evolved into something much stranger: Doctor Who crossed with Doctor Faustus crossed with Larry David crossed with William Burroughs crossed with my therapist. His view of existence—of which he has seen a supernatural amount, having traversed many universes—is desolate and bracing. He builds himself a tiny robot whose sole purpose is to stand on the kitchen table and pass him the butter. “What is my purpose?” asks the robot. “You pass butter,” says Rick. A pause. “Oh my God,” says the robot, head dropped, tiny tin hands hanging. “Yeah,” says Rick in his rancid, sardonic way. “Welcome to the club, pal.” His grandson, Morty, meanwhile, is constantly, stammeringly overwhelmed: “What the hell, Rick? What the hell?!”

Rick and Morty go on adventures, a boy and his grandfather, leaping through a sputum-green portal and riding the wicked rainbows of the multiverse. Little Morty quivers and repines, making fear-noises and doubt-noises like Shaggy in Scooby-Doo. Rick, anesthetizing himself against his own omnipotence, glugs on a hip flask and burps a lot. Booze-spittle decorates his chin. Rarely is he conspicuously or flat-out wasted, but always is he unfiltered, crabby, pestilential. The story lines, relentlessly time-twiddled and dimensionally proliferating, are of stroke-inducing complexity: In one episode, the screen splits into 64 pieces, like a hellish Hollywood Squares. Sometimes Summer goes with Rick; sometimes Beth; sometimes even Jerry. But they always return to the household, to the family. It’s the show’s bitter master gag: Here they go, traipsing through infinite realities; and there they are, back again, condemned to one another’s company by the iron laws of sitcom. No exit.

I was about to write, critical tweezers clicking, that Rick and Morty is “not without insight.” But why be coy? It’s stuffed with insight, gel-injected with insight. In one episode, or in one strand of one episode, Rick books Beth and Jerry for a “two-day intensive” at Nuptia 4, an extraterrestrial couples-counseling institute. “They can save the marriage of a dog and a bar of dark chocolate,” rants Rick. “They can save the marriage of a porn star and a porn star!” At Nuptia 4, technicians are able to “isolate the parts of the subject’s brain containing all perceptions of its romantic partner” and then materialize those perceptions in the form of a “mythologue”—a biological representation of how each partner sees the other. A lever is thrown, an electro-whoosh is heard. Behold! Jerry’s mythologue of Beth, his wife-imago: a towering, punitive Giger-esque horror-mantis with homicidal talons. More whooshing. Beth’s mythologue of Jerry: a shuffling, perspiring worm-blob; when threatened, it tearfully presents its rear.