Rick and Morty

• 1. Introduction

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  Rick and Morty began its life not in a writers' room but as a crude animated short too offensive to describe in polite company. Justin Roiland created The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti for Channel 101, a non-profit monthly short film festival in Los Angeles, in 2006. Dan Harmon later called it "a bastardization, a pornographic vandalization" of the Back to the Future film trilogy. The audience went wild. What had started as shock-value content aimed at festival crowds would, within a decade, become a hundred-million-dollar merchandising and media franchise, a two-time Emmy winner, and the most watched television comedy for adults aged 18 to 24. How did a vulgar five-minute short evolve into one of the defining animated series of its era? The answer runs through a firing, a six-hour writing sprint on the floor of an empty office, and a grandfather-grandson dynamic that turns out to be a surprisingly effective lens for nihilism, cosmicism, and the occasional interdimensional monster.

• 2. From Festival Floor to Adult Swim

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  Channel 101 ran on a simple, brutal rule: a live audience voted which pilots continued as a series. Roiland, then producing reality programming, began submitting to the festival a year after its 2004 launch. His pilots were built around "sick and twisted" elements that left audiences baffled. Harmon co-founded the festival and took a liking to Roiland's sensibility anyway, and the two began collaborating. When Roiland was fired in 2006 from a television job he found creatively stifling, he funneled his energy into the Doc and Mharti shorts. He kept making them until the characters evolved well beyond their obvious origin in the Back to the Future films. In 2012, Harmon was briefly fired from Community, the NBC sitcom he had been running. Adult Swim approached him soon afterward, searching for a hit show for prime time. Harmon, unfamiliar with animation, phoned Roiland instead of pitching something himself. Roiland immediately proposed the Doc and Mharti concept, renamed Rick and Morty. Adult Swim development executive Nick Weidenfeld made one structural suggestion that stuck: Rick should be Morty's grandfather. The first draft of the pilot was completed in six hours on the Paramount Pictures lot, in Harmon's unfurnished Community office. Both men sat cross-legged on the floor with laptops. Roiland recalled Harmon telling him: "Wait, if you go home, it might take us three months to write this thing. Stay here right now and we can write it in six hours." The pilot was sold that same day. Adult Swim unveiled the project in May 2012 as part of its development slate and picked it up to series in October 2012.

• 3. Building the Writers' Room

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  Harmon has described the Rick and Morty writers' room as resembling the one used for Community, only smaller and more "rough and tumble verbally." The first season writing staff consisted of Roiland, Harmon, Tom Kauffman, Ryan Ridley, Wade Randolph, and Eric Acosta, with writer's assistant Mike McMahan also receiving writing credit. Like many Adult Swim productions, the show's staff is not unionized with the Writers Guild of America. In 2022, production staff at Rick and Morty filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board to join The Animation Guild. Writers first meet to discuss ideas drawn from personal anecdotes and thoughts on science fiction, then break the story for logical consistency before assigning a single writer to draft an outline. Roiland and Harmon review that outline, and the episode then goes through several more drafts before one of the co-creators approves the final script. Harmon has acknowledged that his perfectionism can cause scheduling delays. That tendency was the primary reason the third season ran only ten episodes instead of the originally intended fourteen. Many episodes follow a story circle, a Harmon structure based largely on Joseph Campbell's monomyth, with the act break landing after "The Meeting with the Goddess" rather than at the more traditional placement. Roiland confirmed that he and Harmon deliberately avoid revisiting past tropes, "in fear of that coming off as disingenuous fan service." Episodes in the first season were sometimes written out of order; "Rick Potion #9" was written second but animated fifth because it made more narrative sense in that position.

• 4. Animation, Voice, and Style

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  Animation for the series is produced using Toon Boom Harmony, a vector-based 2D puppet software chosen partly for economy over traditional hand-drawn animation. Post-production work runs through Adobe After Effects, and background art is handled in Adobe Photoshop. For the first eight seasons, production was handled by Bardel Entertainment in Vancouver, Canada. Mercury Filmworks in Ottawa, Canada took over from the ninth season onward, and Lighthouse Studios in Kilkenny, Ireland has contributed since the seventh season. Roiland has acknowledged that his cartooning style draws heavily from The Simpsons, noting in a 2013 interview that he, Pendleton Ward of Adventure Time, and J. G. Quintel of Regular Show were all of a similar age and shared a subconscious debt to the same reference points. The small "w-shaped mouths" that characters occasionally make are a direct reference to The Ren and Stimpy Show by John Kricfalusi. Season three art director Jeffrey Thompson explained that characters are often drawn with odd or asymmetrical features to avoid looking "too normal to live in the Rick and Morty universe." Roiland improvised a significant amount of dialogue during voice recording, with the goal of making the characters feel more natural. The theme song, composed by Ryan Elder, was originally created for a rejected Cartoon Network pilot Roiland made called "Dog World"; that earlier project was later referenced in the episode "Lawnmower Dog."

• 5. Philosophy and Themes

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  Harmon has described Rick and Morty as a cross between The Simpsons and Futurama, balancing domestic family drama with heavy science fiction. The show draws explicitly on British-style storytelling rather than traditional American family television; Harmon cited The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who as key inspirations. He framed the audience's relationship to Rick by saying: "we don't want to be the companions. We want to hang out with the Doctor, we idolize the Doctor, but we don't think like him, and that's really interesting." At a philosophical level, the series addresses the insignificance of human existence relative to the scale of the universe, with no recognizable divine presence, echoing what researchers describe as cosmicism. Genovesi of Bonn University has characterized the show as exhibiting a nihilistic world-view. Characters respond to cosmic horror and existential dread in distinct ways: Rick asserts the utility of science, while Jerry gets by through denial. Harmon describes Rick as a self-interested anarchist who believes that "the knowledge that nothing matters, while accurate, gets you nowhere." Joachim Heijndermans of Geeks argues that none of the characters can truly handle the absurdity of the universe. Matthew Bulger of The Humanist has read the series as urging viewers to focus on human relationships rather than unanswerable questions. Eric Armstrong of The New Republic sees Morty as a surrogate for the audience: "mostly there to react to Rick's deranged schemes," but ultimately transformed by what he discovers rather than destroyed by it. Troy Patterson of The New Yorker offered a pointed description of the show's postmodern position, calling it "a decadent regurgitation of all its tropes, all at once, leavened by some humanistic wistfulness." Characters occasionally acknowledge the episode's narrative or hint at awareness of a fourth wall, suggesting they know they are figures in a television program.

• 6. Ratings, Reception, and Industry Reach

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  The first season premiered in December 2013 and concluded in April 2014, airing Mondays at 10:30 pm ET/PT. Viewership doubled and tripled over the first six episodes. The third season ended with the best ratings in Adult Swim history, an 81 percent increase in overall viewers over the second season, and a Nielsen poll identified it as the most watched television comedy among adults aged 18 to 24. The fourth season premiere drew 2.33 million viewers against the show's average of 2.51 million, but a decision to split the season in two caused a roughly 40 percent drop in viewership in the second half. The season five premiere was posted on YouTube and drew 1.7 million views in its first twelve hours before the television premiere drew 1.9 million. The season six premiere on the 4th of September 2022 recorded the highest cable ratings for women aged 18 to 24 and 18 to 34, as well as for male viewers in those age groups, for any non-sports telecast that night. The series holds a 90 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes across its entire run. It won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program twice, in 2018 and 2020, and received two Annie Awards. Critics at The New York Times praised it as "grandparenting at its unhinged finest." The show's alumni have spread across the industry. Mike McMahan went on to create Star Trek: Lower Decks. Writer Michael Waldron wrote for Loki, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Avengers: Doomsday, and has said he and his colleagues are "cashing in on our 'Rick and Morty' street cred." Jeff Loveness became a writer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Pete Michels, who directed more than twenty episodes of the show, also directed episodes of Inside Job.

• 7. The Roiland Firing and What Followed

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  In January 2023, it was reported that Roiland faced a felony domestic battery and false imprisonment charge in Orange County, California, stemming from an alleged incident in January 2020 involving a woman he was reportedly dating. A hearing was scheduled for the 27th of April 2023. Following the public revelation, additional allegations surfaced regarding his conduct toward minors on social media. Adult Swim announced the same month that it had cut ties with Roiland and that his roles would be recast, while confirming that production on the seventh season would continue without interruption. In March 2023, the Orange County District Attorney's office dropped all criminal charges against Roiland due to insufficient evidence. At San Diego Comic-Con 2023, producer Steve Levy stated that Roiland's voice work would be replaced by "soundalikes" with no other changes to the characters. Adult Swim revealed the new voices in the seventh season trailer in September 2023, though the names of the replacement actors were withheld until the season's premiere. When the seventh season premiered on the 15th of October 2023, Ian Cardoni was revealed as the new voice of Rick and Harry Belden as the new voice of Morty. On the 19th of May 2026, Dan Harmon confirmed in an interview that a Rick and Morty feature film is in active development, to be directed by veteran series director Jacob Hair.