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Notes -
Anyone watched Solar Opposites? It's a Justin Roiland cartoon with a similar look to Rick & Morty but is a lot lighter and more fun. It doesn't suffer from the euphoric, grimdark, nihilistic worldview I dislike in Rick & Morty. I was pleasantly surprised by the ongoing subplot that is woven into the show as well. It's a good "serious" counterbalance to the total silliness of the main plot.
I think that Rick and Morty's goofy Shmoopy-Doop soul owes way more to Roiland than Harmon. Also, based on the changing DVD Commentaries, I think Harmon went low-effort and now the writer's room exists to launder people's neices and nephews. (A bunch of writers who go on to get shitty streaming shows have mediocre later-season rick-and-morty episodes as their only significant credit).
[Harmons] get lazy, and they [bring in guest writers].
And then the guest writers bring in guest writers and eventually...there be Season 4.
Also, your repeated emphasis on Nihilism says to me you've been watching too many YouTube video essays on how great Rick and Morty season 1 is because of it's Themes. Get away from this sort of content.
I actually see a lot of the 4chan style of geek humor in Solar Opposites; the contempt for the modern/normie world, the utter refusal to believe that everyone else hasn't seen the films/TV you've seen, the intentionally arch, tropey Wall story feels like a rushed shitpost. The aliens themselves look like laundered Pepes.
I never watch YouTube video essays, or YouTube videos at all for that matter. I don't even read text essays about movies, games or TV shows, except for what people write here on The Motte. You might want to recalibrate.
Yeah, I see the same. But I think the show is self conscious about its 4chanesque characteristics, while R&M is like a Redditor who thinks he's an original, "misunderstood genius" and is not self aware. I actually only understand maybe 30% of the movie and TV references in Solar Opposites, but the rest of the jokes land well enough that it doesn't matter.
I just miss the episodes where Rick's solution to problems was to hit the problem with a blunt object and shout "Run, Morty!"
Now he just flips out augs. Rick's Inspector Gadget augs enable lazy writing.
For sure. He got Flanderized from "alcoholic dirtbag mad scientist in over his head" to "demigod murderhobo with plot armor." The former was a lot funnier.
Season 1 episode 2 is where he creates sapient life, uplifting
claya dog, and he takes it far enough past ordinary human intelligence that the cyborg-dog himself is able to uplift others.Season 1 episode 1 act 1 is about a (brief drunken) plan of his to wipe out life on Earth. Episode 3 is where he literally gets a hobo murdered via the underpaid
adventurermercenary his partnership hired. By episode 6 he's gone full hobo himself, skippingtowndimension to escape the mutated+slaughtered Earth he inadvertently created.I think Ep6 was already a pretty solid consequence-free escape, but by episode 9 he outsmarts and beats up Satan.
The whole "demigod murderhobo with plot armor" thing is naturally a little offputting to many people and a lot offputting to everyone else, but the show always printed it right on the tin.
The show's gone downhill, but I think the main explanation is just the prosaic one that applies to any show: the writers use their best ideas first, because why would you save something for season 6 when you don't even know if you're going to be renewed for season 2, but then by the time you get to season 6 you're trying to choose between your 52th-best set of ideas and your 53rd-best...
The only Rick-and-Morty-specific problem I've noticed is that they hate continuity, so much that they'll write fourth-wall-breaking rants about how much they hate continuity, but there's only so much pleading to the contrary they can take from the audience before they start throwing a few bones, and so now they're having to throw in the arc-plot episodes they despise ... and even in the rest of the episodes they're probably constantly worrying whether each and every plot point is too grossly inconsistent with every ass-pull tech they came up with three seasons earlier.
Edit: I just saw your
below, and I think Two Brothers might be the best example of what I'm talking about at the end. That weird underproduced ad lib, the sort of thing you'd expect to either get upgraded to "rough draft" or downgraded to "cuttting room floor" rather than animated straight-out, and yet it's so funny in part because you can tell they're having so much fun with it! They don't seem to be enjoying themselves as much anymore. That's understandable, since they started with this horribly dysfunctional cast of characters that doesn't make mixing "having loads of fun" and "honest close introspection" easily, but I can see how the "loads of fun" crowd might be especially disappointed.
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Interesting because the sheer silliness of Rick and Morty is the prime reason why I haven't been able to get into it. I'm very comfortable with entertainment that plays with themes of existential dread and nihilism (SOMA, Blindsight and It's Such A Beautiful Day being some of the examples I enjoy the most).
The problem for me is that the best media that tackles these themes actually drive their point home and makes you feel it in your gut on a deep level. R&M on the other hand exists on so many levels of silly absurdist irony that any of the themes it wants to convey often get completely defanged in the process, and it leans so far into it that most of the scenes with any amount of seriousness to them end up suffering because they don't feel like a natural extension of what was occurring before. Also, sometimes the characters just straight-up spout "Nothing matters" quotes which seems overly on-the-nose to me. Outright spelling out your themes to the audience like that is generally a bad idea.
With regards to the immorality of the characters that you mentioned, I would agree that the characters are not people you should look up to, but I actually think the show hammers this home pretty abundantly. I don't think this element of R&M undermines the show, either - I think fiction that's filled with amoral characters or even downright terrible people can be fine pieces of entertainment which are all the better because of the moral greyness of the world presented. Shows like Breaking Bad, films like Joker and books like Blood Meridian are prime examples of this. Rather, R&M simply fails at properly conveying the themes it's based around, and presents it in a 100-levels-of-irony manner which I really can't help but tire of extremely quickly.
Completely agree.
In addition to the moral grayness, these works treat seriously the terrible emptiness and horror of deep cynicism and nihilism. R&M (the show) comes across as a college freshman level take, the work of someone who has lived a comfortable life and who wears nihilism as a fashion accessory rather than of someone who has peered deep into the human soul and seen despair, loneliness, and the twisted curvature into one's own self, consumption by one's own vices. Which is probably okay because R&M is at root supposed to be a silly cartoon. But it still sometimes pretends to be more than it is.
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I still chuckle at Gazorpazorpfield and Two Brothers. I love how much fun they had recording that episode.
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