Rick & Morty

If you ever start watching this adult animation (and I’ll tell you why you should in a minute), you’ll instantly be struck by three very irritating things about it:

1.      The animation is so crude you’ll be forgiven for thinking the show’s creators couldn’t be bothered to spend any time on it

2.      Rick and Morty, despite being grandfather and grandson, refer to each other by their first names.  Not just on the odd occasion either, but constantly, till almost every sentence is punctuated with unending reciprocal name-dropping

3.      Rick, the grandfather, is a cranky old bastard, and while this is hard to adapt to at first, it’s the fact that he burps while he speaks that will have you reaching for the remote to try watching something else due to sheer disgust.  He doesn’t pause in a sentence to belch and then carry on.  His throat reverberates while it emits digestive gasses in the middle of words, so that he uses this emission to power his speech, rather than air from his lungs like the rest of us.  Let’s not generalise, but old men are mostly kind of gross.  Rick out-grosses them all.  In addition, when he’s a bit sloshed, he has this patch of drool on his chin that just makes you want to get out a hanky and start wiping your TV screen, even though he’s an animated character

Acknowledge these things.  Take a note of how they make you feel.  But believe me that they soon go away for the following reasons:

1.      As you work your way deeper into each of the three series, you’ll realise that the animation is actually breath-taking.  Sure, Morty still looks like a kid scribbled him into life, but as he and his grandfather travel to more and more planets and alternate realities, this whole universe of rich imagination comes to life before your very eyes.  There are aliens from the depths of the darkest trenches of human minds (sci-fi orientated, geeky writer minds), with limbs on limbs on sex organs.  There are landscapes that no live action or CGI could realise.  The brutal action demands total attention.  You’ll want to rewind and watch bits again just to bask in the spectacle

2.      The excessive name-using never really relents, but you simply stop noticing it, so don’t worry about that

3.      And, as for the burp-speaking, you will come to terms with it.  In fact, you might even go as far as starting to feel affectionate about it.  Don’t tell me you’ve never been surprised by a digestive interruption in the middle of a conversation and simply tried to pass it off as a change of tone, or blurted out “Oh, excuse me” while clasping a hand over your mouth and its offence.  The fact is, Rick doesn’t have time for this.  So let’s look at why

The basic premise of this programme is fairly generic.  American family in the suburbs.  Farcical things happen in a way that they only can in a cartoon.  The twist is that live-in grandpa, Rick, is a supremely intelligent scientist with his own portal gun and extensive experience in travelling between universes and dimensions.  Rather than bonding with his grandson by pretending to find football interesting, he drags him on adventures across the full spectrum of space, time and reality.  It’s pretty high-concept stuff, but it’s all brought down to earth (literally – lol) by the fact the family members just see these trips as adventures.

And what a great word.  Adventure.  Adult life simply does not contain enough adventures.  Though, as a child, an adventure meant going to the park when it was raining and pretending to be in Jurassic Park.  As an adult, it means getting your smartphone out on a busy street and seeing if a moped-mounted thief is going to come and grab it off you.

So, off go Rick and Morty, gallivanting around in their clapped-out spacecraft and leaving a trail of world-altering destruction.  Sometimes, cynical older sister Summer, is allowed to come along, brilliantly juxtaposing the drama of high-school crushes against the demise of a whole alien race.  Further banality comes in the form of Morty’s parents’ relationship, with Jerry and Beth teetering on the edge of divorce while the universe teeters on the edge of catastrophe.

Some episodes do seem to pair up family members into a formulaic plot and subplot structure, but their adventures still strike consistently entertaining chords, with the show’s overall subject matter elevating it above standard crude humour-based animation for adults.  Rick & Morty never shies away from intelligence.  Rick, as the owner of an unmeasurable IQ, must balance out his genius with the view of the world it forces upon him: he recognises the absurd farce that constitutes life.  This makes him seem cold and unhuman, something which the programme embraces in its plots.

In turn, this is why the show is so far up the IMDB list of the top 250 TV shows of all time, based on average ratings, with a score of 9.2 landing it in eighth place.  Not bad for what looks like a puerile cartoon.  A 22-minute of Rick & Morty packs a whole universe of challenging philosophy, eye-popping artistry and laser-sharp social commentary into your brain via your eyeballs and earholes, so jump on this bandwagon and get ready to impress fellow office drones with the news that, yeah, you’ve seen all of the eighth best TV show of all time.