Rick and Morty

I watched Rick and Morty first some time after the first season had ended. In all honesty, I was sort of turned off by it to begin with. The animation is very similar to that of Family Guy - a show that I kind of liked in its earliest years, but got sick of a good while back. It's also a bit of a gear-shift to handle just how dark and messed-up the show gets. I realize there was a time when the Simpsons was shocking, but Rick and Morty is willing to descend to some dark, stygian depths.

Yet somehow, it mines this darkness for comedy. And it works.

Given the people behind it, I guess that shouldn't be such a surprise. The show was co-created by Justin Roilland and Dan Harmon. Roilland was behind the excellent Channel 101 series House of Cosbys, and though I got to know Harmon through Channel 101 as well, he's obviously more closely associated with Community (and the behind-the-scenes drama thereof.)

Much like Community, Rick and Morty dares to have a solid emotional core rather than being satisfied with safely shallow characters. It defies science fiction comedy television conventions (if such a narrow category exists) by making the one-off gags leave longterm scars. It never shies away from the kind of morbid scenarios to which an episode's premise would extend.

Ok, so what is the show about?

The show centers around Rick Sanchez and his grandson, Morty Smith. Morty's big sister Summer, his mother (and Rick's daughter) Beth, and his utter disappointment of a father, Jerry, round out the main cast. Rick is a super-scientist - while the show is set in contemporary times, Rick travels through space and across dimensions having adventures with bizarre and often disgusting aliens, and he brings Morty along with him, despite the fact that Morty is a just a dweeby, anxiety-ridden kid.

Rick's clearly the star of the show, with Morty serving as the audience surrogate. Rick is an asshole, an alcoholic, a drug-addict, a genius, and clearly acts the way he does because of a deep depression.

Like many a good science fiction show, each episode has a premise that takes a hypothetical science fiction concept and runs with it to its logical extremes. Typically, the show will have parallel plots with Rick and Morty doing something and the rest of the family doing something else - these "rest of the family" plots do sometimes drag (there's a subplot in one episode that involves a vacation on a replica of the Titanic to allow people to experience the events of the movie that feels really out of place next to the bizarre and otherworldly stuff the show excels at) but at its best, the plots complement each other, and expand on a meditation on the kind of frustrations and unhappiness of life.

The show gets dark in multiple ways - from shocking violence and the kind of existentially terrifying scenarios that only science fiction can really put a person through, to the more mundane stories of a family trying very hard to be happy with each other.

This all might make you wonder how the hell this show could be a comedy, and to be fair, some might just be totally turned off by it. But for those of us who live with those dark thoughts occasionally bubbling through our minds, Rick and Morty is refreshing in its brutal honesty.

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day At Camp

Recently, Netflix released an eight-episode mini-series that was a prequel to the 2001 cult comedy film Wet Hot American Summer, from State alumni Michael Showalter and David Wain (with other State alums in the cast.) While the film was not a success in the theaters, it has become a beloved cult film, particularly among my own circle of friends.

When we were in High School and during the summers between years at college, my friends and I would make what I like to call "negative budget" movies - stuff shot on a camcorder and with essentially no production value, though I like to think we had enough self-awareness to make this lowest of lo-fi productions part of the charm.

Wet Hot American Summer was definitely an inspiration in terms of tone and eagerness to point out our own inconsistencies. Many of our earliest productions were parodies of individual movies - the first really big one being "Battle Royale with Cheese," a parody of the Japanese movie Battle Royale (which you might have heard of as the story that the Hunger Games ripped off.) To give you an idea of the level of creativity we were working with, we at one point worked in essentially the whole training montage from WHAS into the middle of a parody of a movie about a group of high school kids killing each other by government mandate.

The purpose of my telling you all of this is that Wet Hot American Summer holds a dear place in my heart. And now, the movie's creators have made a prequel fourteen years later, stretching to even greater absurdity the fact that they're all playing teenagers.

And holy crap, it works.

The tone of the series fits completely with that of the movie. Some of the absurd elements of the film are given origin stories - a move that might be controversial, but the origin stories themselves are quite entertaining. But overall, enough new absurd elements are introduced that none of the illogical spirit of the original is lost.

Excitingly, essentially everyone form the original cast is back, and it's kind of fun to realize how many of them have become far more recognizable stars. Elizabeth Banks, for example, had a fairly small role in the movie, but here she's given an beautifully bizarre backstory and arc.

Several new characters are introduced as well, and we have the fun of finding out why they aren't there on the last day of camp (the setting of the movie.)

WHAS might embody the epitome of the comedy subgenre I like to call "Delightfully Self-Indulgent," where the excesses of the work are part of its charm (though not quite at the same level, Hot Rod would be another example of this. Also, much of Will Ferrel's movies like Anchorman would fit in this category.)

As such, some are sure not to like it as much, but I think those people are probably too pretentious or serious for their own good. This is silly, silly fun.