When you write about television, you tend to use super flowery language. It can become a little… not grating, but it kind of misses the point sometimes. When’s the last time you watched a show where all you could think was “Oh my god… awesome.”
That show, for me, is Rick and Morty, which is close to wrapping up its first season on Adult Swim (Mondays, 10:30 p.m. ET). The premise is pretty simple: Doc Brown (Rick, voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland) is an alcoholic and Marty McFly (his grandson Morty, also Roiland) is a developmentally disabled nervous wreck. They proceed to have adventures that span from alternate universes to at-home drama.
Now, this is the part where I tell you that Rick and Morty is a Dan Harmon creation. The Community guru co-created Rick and Morty with Roiland, and his voice is all over the thing. From the sci-fi touches, to the eerie details (Rick’s grandfather likes to wear a Superman costume while watching his wife make love to her new boyfriend) to just Rick’s pure, unchecked alcoholism. It is the “dark, gritty” cable series Harmon was always meant to make.
And this show is dark. We’re in dicey, spoiler-y territory here, but it is a cartoon. In Monday night’s episode, Rick confessed to his teenaged sister Summer (Spencer Grammer) that he and Morty were living in a universe in which the versions of themselves that originally existed were dead. Oh, and they’re buried in the backyard, so Morty literally has his own corpse but feet away.
What’s amazing is that the series uses this as an uplifting moment, but not before getting through even bleaker material. Morty uses this example to show Summer that nothing is guaranteed in life. “Nobody exists on purpose,” he says. “Nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?”
That’s a lot to get through. However, even the folks that just like the idea of a fun sci-fi comedy with an alcoholic, sexist old man will be fine. The series isn’t hard to get into, and the jokes almost always hit as hard as the statements of humanity’s meaningless existence.
It’s, kind of shockingly, become quite the hit for Adult Swim and is already renewed for a second season. That means watching this show won’t force you to be ingrained upon an army of nerds with inside jokes constantly begging you to fight for the show to continue. In Harmonworld, that’s quite a bit of a relief.
Everything else about Rick and Morty that deals with Harmon, however, is pure gold. If True Detective never existed, it’d easily be my candidate for top new show of 2014. Though I don’t want people to get too many ideas, because they’ll start drawing parallels between Rust and Marty and Rick and Morty way too quickly.
