We’re All Going to Die! Come Watch TV.
There’s been some thinky things written about the “monoculture” recently, and its a concept I’ve bought into in the past — the idea that at some point in the near past there was a general consensus about what pop culture mattered. I mean when the final episode of M*A*S*H pulled in 106 million viewers in 1983, that was like half the fucking country at the time. It’s easy to decide that there was a time when we all experienced the same pop culture.
It’s both true and untrue. There were fewer choices, so we were all aware of stuff in a way we aren’t now. Now half my conversations involve locating overlapping TV shows or books or music to center a conversation; finding a TV show that everyone sitting at a table has watched and appreciated can be time-consuming, because we all make our own zeitgeist now. This is not a bad thing, really, and since it’s coupled with TV shows and other pop culture ephemera being accessible far longer than it once was (via streaming and DVD and Internet download) the zeitgeist evens out, slowly, as people go back to experience things they skipped the first time around. Back in 1993 if you were at all into Science Fiction, you were at least aware of The X Files, whether you enjoyed it or not. These days, shows can be on for years and not achieve any sort of cultural penetration.
Recently, the TV Show I use as my password to the Cool Folks I Want To Talk To is Rick and Morty, airing on Adult Swim. This is the best show on TV these days, and if you like science fiction chances are you should be watching this show, unless occasionally dumb and puerile humor ruins things for you, you humorless bastard.
What Do You Think of This F-flying Vehicle, Morty? I Built it Out of Stuff I Found in the Garage
First of all, the stories on this show are pretty amazing. None of the sci-fi concepts by themselves are special or wholly original; in fact on paper you’ve seen them done before, plenty of times: Alternate universes, infinite versions of people, alien parasites, nested dreams. But what the show has done brilliantly — and consistently — is dig into these premises like no other show has before, mining them for dark, perverse jewels of comedy gold that are also brilliant sci-fi deconstructions and subversions.
Take a recent episode, in which Rick reveals that the battery powering his self-made interdimensional spacecraft is actually a microverse he created. When a planet in the microverse evolved a sentient life form, Rick transported down into the battery and presented himself as a god/alien, and gave them the gift of electricity, generated by having the entire population stomp on stompboxes all day their whole lives, with 80% of the power being sent up to Rick’s spaceship. And also to charge his phone.
When the ship won’t start, Rick discovers that the race of people in his microverse have evolved in his absence, and a scientist among them (Zeep, voiced brilliantly by Stephen Colbert) has created a miniverse, waited for a planet in that miniverse to attain sentience, and then transported himself down there and pulled the same trick, thus the microverse people no longer needs to produce power, and thus Rick’s ship won’t start. When Rick, Zeep, and Morty transport into the miniverse, they discover a scientist there has just created a teenyverse that has yet to produce a sentient life form, but it’s only a matter of time.
I mean: Seriously. That is already enough material for a trilogy of novels, and this is a 25-minute cartoon with a B-plot we haven’t even discussed yet, which is also brilliant and funny (Summer, Morty’s sister, is left behind in the spacecraft and the ship’s sentient AI is instructed to keep her safe, and the horrible, mind-bending ways the ship contrives to keep the teenage girl safe not only traumatize her almost to insanity [three words: melting ghost babies] but actually change the geopolitical course of the world where the ship is stranded).
When the third scientist realizes he is the creation of the creation of Rick and that his whole universe is a ploy, he commits suicide, stranding Rick, Zeep, and Morty in the Teenyverse. They’re stuck there for months, and Zeep’s reaction to essentially meeting god and discovering he is an abrasively alcoholic mad scientist who created his world solely to power his brake lights is to go to war with him. The most audacious moment is later, when they’ve escaped the Teenyverse and Miniverse and are racing to escape a vengeful Zeep and the Microverse, Rick casually destroys the Miniverse by sweeping it off a table, after he’s seen with his own eyes that it contains a universe with sentient beings. Not to mention an entire other universe inside it. I mean, holy shit.
And it is hilarious because of this irreverence. The jokes often center on burps and masturbation, but this works because those puerile moments are often layered on top of a grim and nihilistic universe that feels somehow dangerous in spite of the sheer lunacy. Because the ultimate message of Rick and Morty, underscored time and time again, is that nothing matters. Nothing you do makes any difference. There are infinite universes, infinite version of you, and thus destroying one Miniverse or Teenyverse, or what have you is meaningless. As are you. As is everything you’ve ever done.
Like I said: Holy shit.
Every Morning, Summer, I Eat Breakfast 20 Yards Away from My Own Rotting Corpse!
The characters are also a big reason this show works as well as it does. When you’re working with an animated sitcom featuring high-concept sci-fi plots, you could easily make your characters one-note: The mean, crazy genius; the awkward kid; his snotty sister; befuddled parents who never catch on. At the end of each episode everything goes back to normal.
Rick and Morty takes another tack: Nothing ever goes back to normal. The characters actually catch on to what’s happening and have to deal with the fallout from the insanity. In one episode, Rick and Morty accidentally destroy the Earth after Rick off-handedly gives the hormonal Morty a working love potion that mutates a flu virus going around, turning everyone into monsters (hilariously referred to as Cronenbergs), triggering the end of society. Rick identifies an alternate universe where Rick and Morty are more or less the same, but are about to kill themselves in a terrible accident. They arrive just after the accident, bury themselves, and take over their alternate identities.
This is a hilariously dark moment in the show, and it changes Morty. He’s haunted by it, and while he’s still recognizably Morty, he’s also ruined by this knowledge. He knows nothing matters. He knows it’s all meaningless. He knows he is one of infinite Morties.
Morty’s parents, Beth and Jerry, are fascinating studies in simple character development: Married because Beth became pregnant at 17, they love and loathe each other, drifting apart only to come crashing back into each other. Jerry is a mediocrity, fired from his advertising job, not very bright, but fiercely loyal to his family. Both begin the show aware of Rick’s eccentricity, but come to realize just how insane (and awesome) Rick’s activities are. They become comfortable with alternate realities and versions of themselves (Jerry spends one episode stranded in a Day Care for Jerrys created by Rick for those moments when he doesn’t want to lug Jerry around), alien creatures, and the tenuous nature of reality itself. Similarly, Summer, Morty’s sister, begins the show as a popularity-obsessed older sister, but has embraced her grandfather’s insanity as well as the meaninglessness of her existence, albeit not to the same extent as Morty.
The characters have all changed, and if Rick is the lone exception — still abrasive, drunk, selfish, and callous — this is balanced by his largely obscured backstory. Absent from his family for decades, there have been hints that Rick is not only suicidally depressed, but also hiding plenty of things — from the viewers, if not his family. Rick’s character development will likely come as those details are slowly revealed. For an animated sci-fi comedy, the characters on this show have evolved a lot in a very short time. And the effect this has on the show is simple: It means that the things that happen matter, and that makes the emotional beats of the show much more effective. Which is ironic since the point of the show is that nothing matters.
All this to say: Watch Rick and Morty. It’s genius.