Rick and Morty, seasons 1-3

My introduction to Rick and Morty was the long, not particularly funny couch gag on The Simpsons. Nonetheless, the show has been a huge hit and is constantly being referenced online and seems to be on track to become this generation’s South Park – so I decided to give it a go.

Honestly, the friend I was watching it with and I almost gave up after three episodes. It didn’t click. The show introduces its main characters, obviously riffing on Doc and Marty from Back to the Future, which was indeed the show’s starting point. However, going in its own direction, the show has Rick and Morty as grandfather and grandson, with Rick an alcoholic sociopath and Morty an overly naïve adolescent. Both are voiced by co-creator Justin Roiland, who I know from voicing the annoying but amusing Earl of Lemongrab in Adventure Time, and his performances take some getting used to. Morty stutters and whines, while Rick’s speech is punctuated by annoying burps.

The first episode seems to try way too hard. The humour is very adolescent, and the audience is expected to laugh at things like Morty having to shove things up his rectum and blowing up aliens in explosions of gore that probably seem edgy to kids who have never seen the likes of Superjail – with Rick having much in common with The Warden.

The Lawnmower Man with dogs subplot in the second episode amused me and made me think the show had potential – though I’d already seen the most amusing part as a clip online without knowing what show it was from – but the lazy gross-out humour of the third episode set inside a body made it seem like the show had very little to offer. But after a few friends strongly urged me to keep going, I persevered.

Now, after all the available episodes, I can say I’m a bit of an unusual case. Rick and Morty is one of those Marmite shows – either adored or reviled. People seem to think it’s either the best show ever created or utterly worthless stoner-bait liked only by the very sheeple the show likes to admonish to make itself look cleverer. But for me, I think it’s pretty good. It has some great moments and some utter dud episodes. Some of the ideas are thought-provoking, some unoriginal, and some half-baked. Sometimes we’re just supposed to laugh at butts farting green clouds. Again.

The show really gets interesting when Rick’s solution to a problem gone completely out of hand is simply to slip into another dimension and take the places of a Rick and Morty who happened to die just them. There are after all infinite universes, so if you can cross between them, why not? But this doesn’t just get left there, it becomes continuity and takes a psychological toll on Morty – and raises the question of whether Rick has done it multiple times before.

This is where the show gets interesting. Of course, like most multiple-universe sci-fi it really doesn’t begin to broach the real conception of infinity. The show indicates there are a bunch of remarkable versions of the characters from other universes, like a doofus Rick or a lizard Morty or even two Mortys who dress like the characters from Gravity Falls (in one of many references to that show, because the creator is buddies with Roiland). But of course, in infinite realities there are infinite versions of each of these, plus infinite that are not like them, with infinite universes being created in infinite fractions of time from each and every moment, so having just ‘a whole bunch including some quirky unique ones’ doesn’t really cut it – even if most of the show’s best episodes are based on taking this idea further to have, for example, an evil Rick and an Evil Morty, a ‘Citadel of Ricks’ who decided to get together and in some cases exploit the rest, and even jaded corrupt police officer Mortys showing around good-hearted rookie Ricks.

Perhaps the heart and soul of the show is trying to discover whether or not Rick has a heart and soul. He’s decidedly an antihero, perhaps one of the most reprehensible characters ever created, willing to create whole universes to power his car battery and destroy them too, drunkenly devising Saw-like games to slaughter people he doesn’t like, watching Morty writhe in pain with two broken legs with little to no interest, and subjecting his family to endless mind games and manipulations. Yet it’s very compelling for the viewer to speculate that it’s all a façade for a deeper pain and yearning, a wish to be accepted and for others to help him with his inner pain – which was at the centre of the season 2 cliffhanger and remains interesting even after he illustrates how getting caught was part of his plan. Witness one version sacrificing himself to save Morty, or a flashback about his love for his wife and daughter that it turns out he fabricates, or the close friend who reveals that his exuberant random catchphrase is actually a cry for help. He even tries to zap out his brains!

For some reason, it tends to be the show’s most uninteresting and unfunny moments that take off as the most popular, simply because they’re big, obvious moments. Rick sending Morty on a dangerous mission to get him a drug that makes him do a silly dance, or spontaneously coming up with a song called ‘Get Schwifty’, or turning himself into a pickle. These seem aimed at just making stoners laugh at how random and zany the show is, but I can’t say I find them funny at all.

I’ve seen a lot of this humour before, too. Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide has a lot in common with a machine shocked that its purpose is to pass butter, perhaps with a dash of the toaster from Red Dwarf – which also has the ideas of hallucinating a whole life only to see a ‘Game Over’ screen and an alternate universe version of a cool character with a bowl cut and buck teeth. In fact, most of Rick and Morty’s humour aims to be edgy and boundary-pushing, but it’s actually all mostly very safe, on ground previously trodden by the South Parks and Family Guys of the world. Attempts to be edgy by joking about sex robots and cuckoldry and of course that ultimate edgelord button, people having traumatic memories of childhood sexual abuse, are sub-4chan attempts to shock, and the one and only time I was surprised the show ‘went there’ was when it showed drunk Rick rants about Israel – which was genuinely surprising and funny, with the point being that the most feared and respected man in the universe feels awkward and babbles excuses when it comes to the tension there. Though the most recent episode glibly suggests peace was attained there by getting high. Typical.

There’s also some episodes that are total duds. Using interdimensional cable as an excuse to just have the actors ad-lib only results in ‘You had to be there’ style moments, and those episodes were probably the show’s worst. At least the montage of memories in season 3 brings with it the interesting moral question of how many of Morty’s memories have been altered by Rick – including, endearingly, any time that Rick messes up and gets embarrassed in front of Morty.

For all the faults I found with the show, though, what I really liked was how it put its characters through cheesy sci-fi situations but actually allowed that to have a deeper impact. Morty is changed by the knowledge that there are myriad other universes and he’s expendable. Summer has the harrowing experience of a machine taking ‘keep Summer safe’ to horrifying extremes. Beth has to wonder if she’s only a clone who believes herself to be the real Beth. Jerry is the show’s punching bag but has the curious experience of being put in a position to help assassinate Rick. These people are altered by what they go through, even if it turns them into much worse people ready to commit murder almost as easily as Rick is. When Rick and Morty shines is when it raises interesting questions about existence and purpose in a multiverse where you are one of countless identical versions of yourself, if you even exist at all and can trust your beliefs.

I’ll watch all there is of Rick and Morty, but honestly I would call it hit-and-miss at best, occasionally deep and inspired, but far too often formulaic and unoriginal. I’d call it above average, but not by much. 

The Boondocks – Season 4

And so The Boondocks came to an end. I was glad there was a little more of the show, that I could watch the last episodes knowing that no more would be to come, and there were a couple of good episodes here. But this was definitely more whimper than bang. Firstly, Aaron McGruder wasn’t on board, and what he brought to the show – what this season lacked – was very obvious. He is clearly a good bit smarter than any of the remaining writing team, and knows that there needed to be an intelligent undercurrent subverting everything all the characters said for the show to work. It wasn’t there.

Secondly, the animation – which was never top-notch – has been given over to Studio Mir. Now, I suspect Studio Mir and Studio Moi have a fair bit of cross-over, but it is downright strange having Legend of Korra and the last season of The Boondocks very obviously animated by the same people. When Korra starts pulling Grandpa faces and all the comedy has the same not-quite-beat-perfect rhythm to it, and you know that the same people are animating the epic story of flying bisons and world-changing defenders of civilisation one day and intentionally offensive gay stereotypes the next, it’s a little unsettling. Plus I’m guessing Nickelodeon pay a fair bit more than Cartoon Network, because The Boondocks looks a fair bit cheaper and more rushed.

But technicalities aside, it’s important to judge The Boondocks on its writing. Some of the previous episodes of this show have been so perfectly-done that I would genuinely rate them as comedy classics. McGruder’s cutting, all-encompassing mockery of modern culture puts the show’s highlights up there with the best South Park episodes. But he’s not on-board any more, and instead the season is masterminded by a woman who wrote for Scrubs and McGruder’s former writing partner on the previous series. There’s an edge missing here – the satirical links don’t quite close, and mostly the set-up is great but the idea doesn’t get developed and stagnates. I think the writers felt like a good idea for an episode was enough to sustain the full 20 minutes. Instead, we end up with some good opening scenes leading to very boring mis-fires.

Old ideas are rehashed. Stinkmeaner comes back yet again to antagonise Robert. There’s an all-out Breaking Bad parody that raises the questions of why that show needs parodying at all. There’s a full episode tediously following Robert inadvertently joining the Freedom Riders that despite a lot of action goes nowhere and makes no point. When two of the better episodes are about Robert having an abusive relationship with Siri, and about him becoming a ‘male escort’, you know a show is on its last legs. Though the inevitable old-lady-pimp scenes were funny.

Still, of just ten episodes, three stood out as genuinely good. One was about a hair product that does wonders for afro-American hair, but is derived from Huey’s attempts to make home explosives. It unfolds in a by-the-numbers way, but its jabs at the beauty industry and the fact that even when it’s revealed the stuff is dangerous people still love it make for a clever and entertaining episode. Better than that is the very last episode, though it didn’t have the heft of a season finale. When Riley finally gets called out on saying everything is ‘gay’, it leads to a twisted sequence of events where he is extorted by a series of oppressed groups until finally he becomes ‘the poster boy for retardation’. 

It was an irreverent mix of political incorrectness and social commentary, which raised some good points: in condemning using ‘gay’ to mean ‘bad’, do we also end up censoring observations that something is an action associated with gay culture? Are the groups who garner attention and funding defending minorities actually out for the best interests of the group, or do they just use them and extort others who they can bully? Is there a kind of one-upmanship in different underprivileged groups? Sure, the South Park episode on the Special Olympics did much of this better, and the final stinger uncomfortably fell back on the ‘looking retarded is inherently funny’ concept, but with side-references to Of Mice and Men, a non-mainstream representation of the whole ‘check your privilege’ movement and some genuinely funny moments, it was a good episode.

But my favourite was ‘Freedomland’, in which the Freemans willingly sign a contract to work as entertainers in a slavery-themed amusement park. Now, it may seem like a cheap shot, The Boondocks doing modern-day slavery with the white guy using corporations instead of brute force to get exactly the same results, but it’s more subtle than that. Tom sleepwalks into the same position because he imagines it’s noble. Only Huey wants to upset the corporate system that put them in this position, at least until things escalate. Sure, it all ends in a silly kung-fu scrap, but it’s a clever bit of observational political comedy. And that’s what The Boondocks is supposed to be doing, not just ‘Hurr Grandpa is a shallow idiot and Uncle Ruckus is racist’.

The Boondocks was worth the ride. The last hoorah may have ended up being muted and unconvincing, but there were enough flashes of brilliance to remind me how good this show very nearly was.  

Superjail! – season 2

I'm not sure what it is about Superjail! that keeps me coming back, but there is something.

Season 2, despite a change of animation studios (from Augenblick to Titmouse, the animation studio of Chris Prynoski, who won much acclaim for the fantastic hallucination sequence from Beavis and Butthead Do America), was more of the same. There were a few hints that the studio had changed – a bit more wildness in the Warden’s reality-bending, some sloppier art and some extra fluidity – but they were really very minor, and the style remained much like the first seasons. As did the jokes, the fetish for violence and the resolutely politically incorrect humour. 

Over the course of the scant ten episodes, The Warden and co have a Wacky Race, ruin a gay marriage, attempt to replace Jailbot and encounter various alien races. The twins suffer more than they did in the original run, we find out just how far along Alice is in her transitioning and it all ends on a cliffhanger, ready for this autumn’s season 3. 

Somehow, the limited premise never wears thin, the stupid ideas for weekly stories manage to get fresh spins on them and the characters remain oddly likeable despite being freakish stereotypes. I think a large part of it is the sheer exuberance of animation on display, which reminds me of old Golden Age morphology: if the storyboarders/ director decides that it would make sense for the Warden to change form several times over the course of a sentence, including into a chimney funnel, why not? It’s expressive, it’s strange and it gives everything a weird spark just not seen elsewhere.

Superjail! is successful because it doesn’t need to explain itself. It just does what it wants. It’s not for everyone, but rather to my surprise, it’s for me.

Superjail! (season 1)

There will always be room in American animation for shows like Superjail. Crude, ultraviolent, ugly and careful to present any cleverer ideas masked beneath a layer of intentional stupidity, it descends most directly from Beavis and Butthead and shares similarities in tone and humour with other cartoons airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim section such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Metalocalypse. On the other hand, Superjail! may be the bloodiest, most surreal and most morally reprehensible cartoon to make it onto a mainstream television channel. That said, in the Internet age there are more shocking things on every imageboard, on every flash cartoon site.

Superjail! is the story of an enormous and ridiculous jail. In every episode, a criminal is apprehended by an advanced robot called Jailbot and flown to Superjail past a series of fantastic scenes in a brilliant title sequence that is one of the season’s main hooks. Indeed, it is usually the same criminal, who has escaped somehow or other in the previous episode. The jail is run by another of the series’ main draws, The Warden, a winsome and idiotic master inventor with an effete manner and dress sense that draws comparisons with Willy Wonka. He is helped by officious, neurotic little Jared and amusingly masculine prison guard Alice, while havoc is wreaked by two identical twins with monotone voices I’m sure are an impression of somebody, though beyond Austin-Powers-doing-an-impression-of-Tim-Curry-in-Rocky-Horror, I can’t place it.

Most episodes involve the Warden deciding there is some problem with the jail or getting inspired to improve it somehow, which invariably goes wrong or is sabotaged by the twins and ends up causing a fiendishly inventive bloodbath. As the concepts were often clever or so silly they were very amusing (as when genderswapped versions of all the characters made an appearance), this did not become tiresome over the course of the series – but it was also after all only 11 episodes of 10 minutes each. Plus it was fun to speculate that it was all an illusion, a jail to contain the one criminal – The Warden.

I honestly thought Superjail! wasn’t going to be my thing. Too juvenile, I thought. Too obvious. The amusingly awful moment in the first episode’s intro where Jailbot tries to give the little girl some ice cream would be the only laugh I got from it. Yet there was enough humour, enough clever references and enough fascination in these horrible but compelling characters I found myself really enjoying the show, and happy to watch season 2 – and the upcoming season 3. 

Plus I have to say, slipping in visual nods to the mythological animations in Watership Down definitely didn’t do any harm.