Where the hell did this come from?

Dan Harmon’s beloved sitcom _Community _has long been known to fans as a ‘genre’ show smuggled onto our screens under the disguise of a regular comedy about a community college. In Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Morty, co-creator Dan Harmon has done the opposite – he’s managed to smuggle an earnest, real family drama out to us under the disguise of a wacky, high-concept sci-fi adventure series.

I’ll prove it. Here’s two versions of the premise:

1. Rick is a genius scientist who goes on exciting, dimension-hopping adventures with his reluctant teenage grandson Morty.
2. Beth is a woman with an on-the-rocks marriage to the guy who knocked her up at prom. One day, her estranged, deadbeat dad (who happens to be a genius scientist) shows up at her door asking to live with her. After she agrees he becomes somewhat of a surrogate father to her teenage son, Morty, much to the chagrin of his actual dad.

If “Rick the scientist, Morty the teenager” sounds familiar, it should. The show began its life as an (incredibly lewd) internet cartoon short called Doc and Marty, in yet another parody of the famous Back to the Future duo. Knowing that helps to put the show in its context, and shed light on the exact conversation it’s having with nerd culture.

The brilliance of_ Rick and Morty_ is in how it seems to exist in a quantum superposition of the two premises. Obviously ‘using sci-fi adventures to talk about real relationships’ is some Writing 101 stuff – of course your sci-fi show should be grounded in human drama! But the magic is in how naturally it all flows. It strikes the perfect balance between sly winking, lampshading itself/various genre tropes, and playing those tropes just straight enough to wring the human drama out of it. It’s never cheap. It’s never obvious. Every episode keeps you guessing. And yet here’s that word again, it’s just so earnest.

But that’s not to belittle the sci-fi elements. The show may delight in parodying sci-fi concepts to hell and back (“my grandpa’s a magic scientist!” would be the end of the story in a kids’ show, but being on Adult Swim the show has a healthy dose of cynicism to temper it), but it’s clearly done from a place of love, and you end up with some pretty interesting stuff like a Jurassic Park parody in the form of a theme park of various diseases, but miniaturised and inside a hobo’s body.

All of this culminates in what is without doubt the best episode, Rixty Minutes. To a cynic, the premise of the episode is just ‘Rick and co. watch TV’. And the fact that it’s more than that is a testament to the strength of the show. The setup is that Rick upgrades the family’s cable box to get channels from ‘every dimension’, and yes, much of the episode is the content of those channels in the form of short vignettes… yet the whole escapade is just setup for the ‘real’ story: one channel is from a dimension where the parents, Beth and Jerry, aborted the elder daughter, Summer, never got married, and Jerry became a movie star (and they see a movie he’s in). Ouch.

This leads the parents to explore various dimensions where their lives seem to be a lot better by never getting married, and leads to Summer learning for the first time that they even considered aborting her.

Part of the resolution is an out-of-nowhere moment of profundity from Morty, which involves him unexpectedly calling back to the traumatic events of a previous episode which involved him burying a dead duplicate of himself, finally remarking: “Nobody exists on purpose; nobody belongs anywhere; everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”

This is all to say nothing of the vignettes themselves, all of which were ad-libbed in their entirety by the writers. This is rare in animation. Usually by the time voice recording starts the storyboards are finalised and animation has begun, leaving little ‘wiggle room’ for improv.

Here, clearly the storyboards were drawn around the improv sessions, a difficult feat. The results speak for themselves. Each vignette is weird, free-flowing, creative and totally hilarious. Some are downright Lovecraftian, or perhaps Cronenbergian, as Rick would put it.

The incredible thing about _Rick and Morty _is that this is all done in only eleven 22-minute episodes in the first season. Already (but really, from the start) the show has found a clear voice/tone, has a message to say and knows just how to say it.

It’s returning for a second season this year. Hopefully, like Community, it will last six seasons and a movie.