It's been five years since I last posted an entry about "Rick and Morty," which was shortly after the fifth season wrapped up. A lot has happened. In fact, so much has happened that I keep forgetting that I haven't addressed any of it. First, we should talk about the production changes. Justin Roiland was fired from the show in 2023 after some legal troubles and a long history of misconduct. Rick has been voiced by Ian Cardoni, and Morty by Harry Belden since the seventh season, and I honestly can't tell the difference. The show's other creator, Dan Harmon, is still around, but has definitely taken a backseat. Scott Marder has been the only credited showrunner for a while and Harmon hasn't had a writing credit on any episodes since the third season. Keith David's President Curtis also got a spinoff series, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
However, "Rick and Morty" hasn't lost a step. Arguably, it's improved since I last wrote about it in 2021. If you haven't seen "Rick and Morty" in a while, the changes in the most recent episodes might take some time to notice, but they're there. Rick is still an asshole, but he's more responsive to his family and genuinely seems to care about them now. Morty has become a more assertive teenager who will not only stand up to Rick, but regularly has to be the responsible one to get them out of scrapes. There's still plenty of guts and gruesomeness, but the nihilistic bleakness of the early seasons has been turned way, way down. Happy endings are still rare, but there's no longer the feeling that the creators are being mean to the characters just to be mean to them. Back in the fifth season, I remarked that it felt like the show was growing stale and running out of ways to shock us. In the ninth season, it's clear that they're no longer trying.
Despite the show's initial reluctance, we've now seen pretty much all of Rick's past and complicated relationships with his wife and daughter. And Rick, often in the most complicated and weird ways possible, has been slowly but surely processing some of his unresolved issues and improving his mental health. A major recurring storyline involving an Evil Rick was resolved in season seven, forcing him to self-reflect and move on. He's gotten to the point where he recognizes that many of his evil scientist coping mechanisms are self-destructive and will sometimes take measures to limit them. He's also managed to maintain a much healthier relationship with Beth (and Space Beth). This might initialllook like a situation where a once badass character has been defanged and Flanderized, but this has actually been a very well-considered character arc for Rick Sanchez, and I'd argue that it's paying off some valuable dividends.
"Rick and Morty," for all its science-fiction chaos, is a family sitcom. Many of the episodes regularly have A and B plots with different members of the family, and the humor is very character based. Frankly, Rick works better as a sitcom character when he's on a more even playing field with Morty and the rest of the Smiths. Sitcoms also generally work better when everyone can return to something resembling a neutral status quo at the end instead of the kind of feel-bad, downer resolutions that stopped feeling innovative and daring by season three. This means that a lot of the later episodes are silly and absurd and amount to the characters getting into a bunch of sci-fi enabled hijinks with no deeper meaning behind them. And that works for "Rick and Morty" better than you'd think. There's a recent kung-fu parody episode involving the Hawaiian Punch mascot, Punchy, that's just sublimely ridiculous.
I also appreciate that the show has also moved on from some of its other early schtick. I haven't seen Morty's crush Jessica (Kari Wahlgren) in a significant appearance in a couple of seasons. Since Morty is now a hyper-competent, and much more self-assured character, who finally did go on a real date with her in the fifth season, Jessica doesn't serve much of a purpose anymore. Kari Wahlgren went on to voice Rick's new love interest BugAnne instead. He's clearly not ready for another relationship, but even a friends-with-benefits sitch is a good sign.
Frankly, the great thing about sitcoms was always that you got to know and care about a group of characters over time. And as that inevitably happened with "Rick and Morty," the show had to change. I'm sure that many of the fans prefer the angrier, more subversive earlier seasons, but it wasn't something that was sustainable over a hundred episodes - and we're getting very close to that mark. And "Rick and Morty" is doing just fine.
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