We're currently halfway through the fifth season of Rick And Morty and the show is still going strong. This time, the 10-episode season has no breaks. That's right, they're not breaking the season in half as they did for Season 4 between 2019 and 2020 due to Covid-19.
HBO Asia
The Emmy Award-winning hit animated science fiction series airs on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and HBO GO with new episodes every Monday. Just like the previous four seasons, the latest revolves around genius mad scientist Rick Sanchez who lives at home with his daughter Beth and can never behave. Instead, he constantly drags his timid grandson Morty Smith as well as his son-in-law Jerry and granddaughter Summer on bizarrely dangerous adventures across the universe. After four seasons, the show's creators remain committed to coming up with fresh ideas and engaging stories and developing that emotional bond between viewers and characters in Rick And Morty, while introducing some new characters such as the pompous and stylish Mr Nimbus, a fish-like anthromorph who is Rick's greatest nemesis in this new season.
While praised and having earned positive feedback, the making of Season 5 was a challenge for the team as the producers had to do it in lockdown, forcing the writers to work in two-hour blocks on Zoom. Life spoke with writers and co-executive producers James Siliciano and Scott Marder recently during an online roundtable interview about their experiences and what it took to put Rick And Morty together.
Rick And Morty has always been shuffling through a lot of great ideas. How do you guys keep generating ideas and keep the creative process going, especially when you're in season five?
Siliciano: We just pitch forever. We just pitch ideas and ideas. When we are trying to break a story, we always consider 'Oh, does this bump? Does this conflict with another story we've told?'. We always strive to try and make things feel different in each episode and we're still trying to do that. I mean thousands and thousands of ideas get pitched every season. The answer is to just keep trying to top yourself, which is difficult.
As Covid-19 limited your studio plans, how did you work around that, especially with all the animation you have to do along with the writing and production co-ordination?
Siliciano: Obviously the pandemic has been a challenge. We have been working remotely the entire time. Since March of last year, everything in the show has been done remotely. We moved everything over for the very final bits of Season 4. The new season was mostly written before the pandemic but all the rewrites, the artists working on it, the storyboards and the editing, directing voiceovers, production meetings, we had to do that through Zoom and WebEx. It's been a big challenge. You pitch a joke and there's like that silence afterwards and you're like, 'Oh, is the joke terrible or is it just my internet connection?'. And usually, it's both.
Scott Marder. Photos © HBO Asia
Many adult-oriented animations like The Simpsons, South Park and Rick And Morty focus on dysfunctional families and discuss toxic relationships. Why did you want to make that the centrepiece of the show despite the fact that they are aware of how toxic they are to one another?
Siliciano: I think because it's more interesting. What the show highlights the most is that you know these characters are human and being dysfunctional is part of being human. We are imperfect. Every one of us in this room is not perfect. We all have our own things and especially in the writer's room we talk about how nobody is perfect so why put a perfect family on the screen? And it's much more interesting, emotionally and story-wise, to dig into why people act like that. We explore that because that's human and I think that's what people connect with.
So many fans are curious about Rick's past. Have you ever considered explaining more about Rick's background or maybe a prequel for him?
Siliciano: I think as we have done over the first four seasons, the coolest way to explore Rick as a character is to build him out gradually. Like you've seen in the other seasons, audiences get to learn a little bit more about him and where he comes from. Slowly, we will continue to explore Rick as a character usually in relation to the people around him like Morty and the family to try and build out that world a little bit more.
Marder: Yeah I think the new season is definitely gonna leave some new breadcrumbs that should add that new light to what we know about Rick.
A lot of stories in Rick And Morty deal with the consequences of having unlimited power over one aspect of reality and what happens when you can see the consequences of every action and they don't turn out as expected. Have there been circumstances or are there things you'd like to explore like fantasy powers but then thought that you really can't do that because it would be too much of a downer?
Siliciano: Yeah, all the time. When we're breaking stories, we go down all kinds of paths and not just the ones that come out on screen. A lot of times, things do have different endings or different parts of the journey or atonement. Sometimes, it gets really dark and sometimes it's too dark. At other times, we need to pull the discussion and it never even gets to the page.
Marder: Every writer is an encyclopaedia of a particular sci-fi niche and together it's like this beautiful spectrum of different specialisations of anime and all sorts of different stuff. So collectively, every episode has got swings that we take. The different things that you see make it to the finish line have gone through a dozen drafts that have taken different swipes at different sci-fi things. But there's generally a lot of excitement pursuing all that sci-fi stuff.
According to one of the show's creators, Justin Roiland, is it true that the show was keen to switch up the release strategy to one episode per month?
Siliciano: I think it's certainly interesting. I think what we will see is less of a gap between seasons, which is evidenced by the gap between Season 4 and Season 5. We are hopefully going to be able to continue to make that gap shorter, so the desire to make it one month is interesting. There's pros and cons as to what's more engaging whether it be to have 10 episodes in a row or close together so that you can really dig in and maintain that story or whether they'd be better spaced out. It certainly seems like we're probably stuck with more of a season by season thing.
James Siciliano. HBO Asia
A scene from Rick And Morty Season 5. HBO Asia
