The desires, problems, and insecurities of every Smith family member, including Morty’s dog, are explored throughout the whole series and the human drama never takes a back seat when each episode inevitably flies off the rails. In “Rixty Minutes”, Summer (Morty’s sister) discovers her birth was an accident that ruined her parents lives – all because Rick installed an inter-dimensional cable receiver that gave them access to every channel from every dimension and they were given a glimpse of a reality where Jerry (Morty’s dad) became a famous actor and Beth (Morty’s mom) became a human heart surgeon and not the horse heart surgeon that she actually was in their dimension (Earth Dimensions C137).
“That all sounds great, but is it funny,” you ask? First of all, why are you interrupting me during my review? Second of all, yes. The show does a great job at mixing intelligent, witty humor with the most extremely broad jokes. At one point there was a Zardoz reference, followed by an ironically sexist jab, tagged by a fart joke – all in the span of a few lines of dialogue.
The premise of each episode is just as fun and exciting as well. In the way that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg could satirize a genre while paying loving homage to it, Harmon and Roiland can create legitimate science-fiction plots while poking fun at a lot of the more ridiculous elements of the genre. Dan Harmon is infamous for being a stickler for story structure and it really shows in how deliberate every beat of the story feels. And for a show that dedicates a whole episode to mocking M. Night Shyamalan’s eye-rolling need for some unnecessary plot-twists, there are some genuinely mind-blowing surprises to be had.
But that’s Rick and Morty in a nutshell: a show so much like every show that came before it, that it’s not quite like any show you’ve ever seen before.
While waiting for the just-announced season two, you can catch 8 of the 11 episodes of season one at AdultSwim.com or watch reruns every Monday at 10:30pm on Adult Swim.
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