Where most shows, especially comedies, take their time to get good, Rick and Morty was immediately great out of the gate. Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon’s animated Adult Swim series is perverted and twisted, yes, but first and foremost, it’s hilarious, a drunken spin on Back to the Future that’s already one of the funniest shows on TV. Now’s the time to catch up on (or re-watch) season one, because season two begins Sunday, July 26, at 11:30 p.m. EST. Uproxx had the opportunity to speak to Roiland and Harmon, as well as writer Ryan Ridley (who Community fans might recognize as the Guy from Jeff’s Gym), during the Austin Television Festival.
What can you tell us about season two?
Roiland: It’s pretty cool!
Harmon: More outer space.
Roiland: More space hijinks, more traveling with the family.
Ridley: You learn about the cosmos. We got Neil deGrasse Tyson in every episode.
Harmon: Now, c’mon, he’s going to think everything’s a joke. Compared to season one, the universe is bigger.
Roiland: There’s a little more traveling. There are episodes where we designed multiple species, multiple planets. A lot of design work for one episode that we’ll never re-use any of it.
Ridley: Crazy new lovable characters.
Roiland: That’s right, a lot of breakout characters that people are going to be like…
Ridley: And a notable lack of beloved characters.
Roiland: That we’re holding off on. We’ll come back to them eventually.
Dan, you’ve talked about this with Community, where you don’t want the show to turn into a greatest hits with the Meeseeks in the first episode and third episode and…
Harmon: I think that was our curse in the writers room. I was so gun-shy from Community that I probably over corrected, in terms of warning Justin about, let’s bring back the Meeseeks! Let’s bring back everything people liked about season one! I was like, no, no, we can’t do callbacks, because Community got branded so early on as an inside joke show, and I felt that repetition repelled new viewers. But that’s my head up my ass.
Roiland: No, but honestly, I think it was a good instinct for season two. I mean, going into season three, we’ll probably be a little less gun shy about it. Obviously, it’s not going to become the callback season, but definitely, there are characters or threads that we may want to revisit. If we have a really good reason to, or are excited about it.
Harmon: I just want to say, if I had known what a phenomenon the Meeseeks would become, I think there would have been two Meeseeks episodes in season two. But there are zero.
Ridley: But the truth is, you draw a new character, Justin slightly adjusts his voice. [laughs]
Roiland: We have a character named Mr. Poopy Butthole this year.
Are the episodes standalone, or is there a thread running throughout the season?
Roiland: As much as there was in season one.
Ridley: There’s a slight thread that culminates…
Roiland: If you pluck one out and watch it by itself, you’ll be able to enjoy it. But if you watch them all, you’ll also be able to enjoy it.
Ridley: There’s references to something that finally pays off in the finale. Right, Dan?
Harmon: I mean, I guess, yeah. It’s what Justin said. There’s probably just as much serialization, pound for pound, as season one.
Ridley: It’s kind of like Venture Bros.
Harmon: It’s weird to do the second season of anything, said the TV expert who had several second seasons of shows, because the first season is just, every day at work, you’re just inventing. You have no idea what the show, you haven’t seen a single episode of it on TV, no one has. And then the second season, how can the speaker not affect the microphone, and vice versa? You’re sitting in a writers room, and now you’ve got a season under your belt.
Roiland: A bunch of AV Club reviews and Reddit comments. In my case, 4chan discussions.
Harmon: Not to throw the consumers under the bus entirely, even if you made something in a vacuum and just put it on a TV screen, the second season, it becomes twice as difficult. I think the third season will be twice as easy because we’ll able to learn from our behavior between seasons one and two. I have a feeling the verdict’s going to be, we didn’t have enough fun. Let’s have fun.
What did you learn from season one that brought you to season two?
Ridley: Nothing. [everyone laughs]
Roiland: I dunno, it was weird. Did we learn anything?
Ridley: All the lessons we learned were season two lessons.
Harmon: I think we were afraid to learn anything, because that would mean we had a template. So like Justin said in another interview, a lot of the season one episodes were based on talking about inventions. And we didn’t do that in season two. It was the first time I had even heard that.
Roiland: I actually realized that late in the game. I went through the old, old notes on my phone from my season one ideas, and it was almost entirely invention-based. A shrinking ray, this device, this device, a device that does this. That definitely drove a lot of the story breaking in season one. We built a lot of episodes around devices, sci-fi devices, the shrinking ray, “Anatomy Park” was a shrinking thing. Then we did the cognition amplifier on the dogs.
Ridley: Now I’m realizing a lot of the episodes in season two come from Rick’s past coming back to haunt him. His f*ck ups.
Roiland: There are a lot of f*ck ups.
Harmon: One of my favorite episodes, we meet a former lover of his.
Who are some of the new characters this season?
Harmon: Keith David plays the president of the United States. He doesn’t come back, but it’s clear he’s being added to the mythos. I don’t know if you watch Doctor Who, but the Tom Baker years, there was a lieutenant, he was this government guy who would call Doctor Who sometimes. It’s a different way of widening the world, even though Rick can travel the cosmos, now adding the fact that the president might pick up the phone, and be like, we need your help.
He’s the Commissioner Gordon.
Harmon: There are other characters, too. There’s a big, juicy piece of stunt casting that we did, with a potential new villain.
Ridley: As you said, we have a Khan!
Harmon: He could be or couldn’t be. That’s what I like about the craft of Rick and Morty, not boxing anything in. That’s why we stay away from time travel.
Roiland: You’re talking about Colbert, right?
Harmon: Yeah, Stephen Colbert plays a character who you could definitely see coming back.
Roiland: I don’t want to spoil it, but he’s someone who could come back at any point in time.
Ridley: We also have a new character who should be a big breakout named Paul Fleischman [everyone laughs]. You find out that in some realities, Beth and Jerry get divorced and she re-marries with a nice Jewish gentleman named Paul Fleischman.
When you said the name, I thought accountant.
Ridley: He’s the most Jewish-y guy.
Roiland: Ridley’s Jewish, our line producer’s Jewish, and he’s constantly, every time Paul Fleischman comes up, he’s like, he’s not really offended…
Ridley: They didn’t do him any favors in the character design.
Harmon: I think they call it yarmulke face. We call it pro-semitism.
What’s been the reception to the Simpsons couch gag?
Roiland: Positive. It’s crazy. I haven’t done the thing where I’m glued to every online thing in awhile, but when that aired, I was on everything, just scanning. The only negative comments I found were on 4chan, which is where you’re usually going to get the most brutally honest and unfiltered, and potentially bullsh*t…But even there, it was 95% positive.
Ridley: What was the criticism?
Roiland: I can’t remember.
That you killed them?
Roiland: I don’t even think they were that bad. Most of the criticism was about the episode itself.
Harmon: Did you hear that, Simpsons?
Roiland: I felt mad. I felt guilty that people didn’t like that episode.
Is there any chance of Ice Cube Head showing up again on Community?
Harmon: We’ll have to negotiate with Sony.
