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.