Why Does Rick and Morty Feel Different?

The concept of rick finding life meaningless after discovering the portal gun, is kind of like when you activate cheat codes in a game you've been grinding on and suddenly its boring because you have everything unlocked.

I think another issue is that Morty’s character arc is at odds with the show’s continued existence. In seasons 1-3 there is a really clear developing arc for Morty: he is slowly realizing that Rick is toxic and dangerous. That arc’s natural conclusion would be Morty either defeating Rick or doing something else to permanently end their partnership. This is most clear in Season 3 episode 1, where Morty tries to make it very clear to Summer that Rick is not a hero and that they’re better off without him. The problem is that the show then got an order for a ton of more episodes, and that arc had already gotten too close to its natural end point of Morty turning on Rick. They can’t go further with that arc because once Morty turns on Rick for good, the show is over. That’s something they’d have to do at the end of the entire series. So now the show is spinning its wheels because it doesn’t know how to meaningfully develop that core arc without forcing itself into a series finale.

One of the major factors that people don’t seem to mention enough is that Rick is too sober. Being a functioning alcoholic was a MAJOR part of his character but now seems to have taken a backseat

For me one of the problems is it feels like the characters are becoming too cynical yes they're supposed to be flawed but your still meant to care about them. This is a problem I had with family guy as well because every season the characters seemed to get worse

One thing I noticed was season 1&2 they never called Rick the smartest mammal in the universe season 3 onwards they did. It’s almost like they heard the hype for the show and believed it themselves. In a similar way Rick went from dealing with problems to fighting them e.g. the giant heads in the sky “show me what you got” Ricks response was to sing a song as opposed to when he met Zeus and fought him. Rick went from depressed scientist to a god because of the hype Rick and Morty was getting and I think it’s all the worse because of it.

There is a reason why Gravity Falls never had more than two seasons. The original premise of the show and it's originality was pretty much drained out by the end of season two – it would've needed to go in a whole different direction for it to to still be interesting and innovative. I feel like Rick and Morty passed this point after season 3, and now the creators are trying to figure out in which direction the show should go in the future, hence the chaotic (from a narrative standpoint) and less intriguing last season (meaning in total, there were still some great episodes!). Let's hope for the best guys, I think the show can still have a bright future, but clearly some shift needs to happen.

I miss the show that spent 2 seasons building up to Rick growing as a character and turning himself in. I doubt that show's ever coming back.

R & M went from being refreshingly cynical to just cynical

To quote Jenny Nicholson: "I think the worst thing a franchise ending can do is make you feel kind of stupid and embarrassed for being so excited for it in the first place." Rick and Morty isn't ending, but some of its storylines are and the show is going out of its way to make the audience feel like idiots for ever caring. Not even because the storylines themselves are bad, the show just stops every other episode to go like "Here, are you happy? We're addressing the storyline, cause you wouldn't stop whining." It kills any future excitement people might have, because what's the point if the show resents you for it.

I think that the season 4-5 Smith family could have been fleshed out, because those characters are as interesting as they were when the show started. It would have been really cool to see the now nihilistic family, completely desensitized to the existential horrors of the universe, interact with the society that they now knows doesn't matter. I wish we could have seen that as well, and maybe we will in season 6 after the season 5 finale.

I like both the self-contained adventures and canon-heavy episodes. Some of my absolute favorites from S1 such as "Lawnmower Dog" or "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!" are of the self-contained kind that the authors themselves seem to like best. But, in the last few seasons, the serialized/canon episodes feel much better to me than the others. More fleshed out, funnier, more interesting and creative. Which is weird as the authors apparently don't like writing these, but the ones they enjoy writing feel lackluster now.

Great analysis. Seasons 1-3 had iconic episodes and every season since hasn’t felt the same.

All of the staff writers from the first 3 seasons are gone. Dan Harmon is fully in control of the series as Justin Roiland is largely focused on Solar Opposites. Harmon is a notorious control freak who doesn't like sharing the lead writer's chair and this frequently led to a lot of conflict between him and Roiland who have very different personalities. I think the two main characters of Solar Opposites and their relationship were partly inspired by Roiland's relationship with Harmon. At least that's my theory for which I have no evidence. In season 5 of Rick and Morty you can really feel the absence of Justin Roiland's surreal, anarchic brand of humor. But Solar Opposites has that familiar comedic tone of early R&M. So Roiland got tired of fighting with Harmon for control of his own show, created a new show with another experienced show-runner who is much easier to work with, and is putting all his creative juices into that while letting Harmon run R&M into the ground with his mastubatory approach to storytelling....clearly I have put way too much thought into this.

The whole "We just want to make episodic bullshit, stop asking us to follow continuity that we set up to be clearly followed" shtick got real old real fast.The new writers are honestly at their worst when it comes to the episodic stuff, especially in season 5 (wouldn't it be funny if we did an episode with Horse Semen monsters?) They're at their best when they actually follow continuity and the fanbase clearly agrees on this, as the Evil Morty stuff is the only thing that seems to get discussed at lengh at this point, especially after the season 5 finale.I understand that Dan Harmon thinks he's being really clever by using Rick to voice is distaste for continuity and fans wanting to see more of that, but if this is how you feel then don't fucking establish it in the first place or just stop telling fans how they're allowed to enjoy your show, just comes across as incredibly pretentious.

You've completely missed the mark when you assert that the show is about the meaninglessness of what we do in a multiverse. It's about Rick wanting to believe that what we do in a multiverse is meaninglessness and that he doesn't care about any of it. He had a tragic event in his past, and he compartmentalizes it by asserting that it couldn't matter, and that all things including his own family members are replaceable. He's got some deep scar tissue over that wound, but the show lets us see every once in a while that it DOES matter, he DOES care, and he despises himself when he slips. That is the nature of his self-loathing; he knows intellectually and rationally that his attachments are meaningless, yet he still has them. So when he catches himself, he'll usually double down by doing something even more evil and underhanded to those attached people in his life. This both punishes himself vicariously and doubles down on the intellectual notion that it doesn't matter.

There's something to be said about the text of a show being explicitly antagonistic to its audience. I like all 5 seasons because they show a creative team's evolving opinions on what the aims of an animated sitcom are. Is the point of an animated sitcom just the situational comedy, the absurd situations which generate jokes and humor? Or is it the "character accumulation," the evolution of a character over time as events shape and reshape them? If it's the former, the show can plumb the depths of depravity and pop culture for truly heinous storylines, but never go anywhere. If it's the latter, we get payoffs, but those payoffs can fall into cliche pretty quickly. If I have a point, it's that a fandom that gravitates towards serialized storytelling will inevitably find itself wanting stories that emphasize key characters and arcs- a serialized RnM could essentially become little more than an animated Friends. The creators are clearly resisting the pull that "narrative arc" has on what they're creatively capable of showing, and I'm not sure how they'll resolve that tension going forward.

Agree w/ so many points here. LOVE the show but s5 was not it for me aside from the first ep

If this show started out knowing it had 5-7 seasons before a guaranteed end, I fully believe it would have been, without a doubt, one of the best shows ever created. The reason the first few seasons were so powerful is because they built all those plot lines up not knowing when they’d be cancelled. But then, Adult Swim basically said “this will never end without the death of a creator or something equally intense” and so they ditched the plot lines or else they’d run out of stuff to make. That being said, I am more than okay with episodic disconnected stuff because I have fun with the weirdness.

seasons 1-2 are fantastic, id even argue it started to feel different when season 3 premiered

I feel like part of the problem is that at first, Rick's worldview was both a joke and a challenging question to the audience, and eventually, both the fanbase and the creators started to take it less of a theme or a joke but more as a cool persona. In the later seasons, I feel like Rick's mindset became the show's whole personality. Which is why I feel both compelled and weirded out seeing the show deconstruct Rick in the later seasons. As intelligent as they are at breaking down his character, it kinda seems ironic because it feels like the show's creators and writers are embracing his personality.