Rick And Morty Hasn’t Been Renewed For Season 4 Yet

If you’re a fan of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty, then you’ll no doubt have heard the shock news that it hasn’t been formally greenlit for a fourth season. ‘Outrage! Hellfire!’ you might think, and – once you’ve calmed down a bit – ‘why on earth wouldn’t they renew such an incredibly popular show?’ Which is a fair question, as season three inspired the fans to invade McDonalds restaurants everywhere in a Szechuan sauce-driven frenzy, prompting a bit of a backlash against the fanbase – which is how you know for sure that the show is, if anything, too popular. In 2017, the show was named #1 comedy with the 18-24 and 18-34 demographics, and this is on Adult Swim, itself named #1 network with young adults – so what gives?

The answer is that Adult Swim not having pulled the trigger on the fourth season is a little different from them telling the creators to clear their desks and hop it. In a recent appearance on Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier’s SModcast, showrunner Dan Harmon stated “The reason we’re not working on Rick and Morty right now ain’t because I figured out that I don’t need to impress you…it’s because of a little something called contract negotiations and it’s gotten complicated this time around.” And, in a recent tweet, his partner in crime Justin Roiland placed the blame squarely on Adult Swim’s parent company Turner.

For everyone telling me to get back to work on Rick and Morty (season four) turn your attention to Turner. I’m waiting around just like you. Making some cool video games in the meantime though! @squanchgames

— Justin Roiland (@JustinRoiland) March 22, 2018

Neither expanded on their statements, leaving the door wide open for the kind of wild speculation great journalism is built on. Naturally, Turner – like any given broadcasting company – will be looking to get the project done as cheap as possible without bits actually falling off. However, Harmon and Roiland are no fools, they’ll be as aware as anyone of the show’s popularity, and as such are in a position to ask for pretty much anything up to an actual boat. And, should these unstoppable forces and immovable objects push too far at any point, then yes, the show’s cancellation might actually become a possibility.

However, this would almost certainly not be the end of Rick and Morty. This is far from the first time that an animated comedy with a devoted fanbase has faced cancellation. Futurama (among this reporter’s favourite F words) and Family Guy were both cancelled, in 2003 and 2002 respectively, only to both be revived. Both had the advantage of having been picked up for syndication by – appropriately enough – Adult Swim, ensuring that the fanbase and the viewing public as a whole wouldn’t simply forget about them.

Family Guy proved the more robust of the two – between its success in syndication and high DVD sales, Fox recommissioned the series in 2004 after only two years off the air. Futurama, meanwhile, found itself following in Family Guy’s wake, with that show’s aforementioned DVD sales prompting Futurama to go for broke with its four straight-to-DVD film adaptations, released in late 2007 and 2008. These would later be split up into episodes which comprised a kind of ad hoc fifth season. By 2010, the show had been formally revived on Comedy Central, before being cancelled again in 2013.

This was, really, Futurama reaching the end of its natural life. Like its bigger brother The Simpsons, it had started to see ever-diminishing comedic returns, and they had at least had some practice at ending with dignity, with fully four episodes having been produced under the impression they were the finale – executive producer David X. Cohen wryly commented “At this point I keep a suitcase by my office door so I can be cancelled at a moment’s notice.” At the time, they left the possibility of another revival open, but now, five years down the line, it seems less and less likely.

Family Guy’s cancellation and subsequent revival, on the other hand, was the shake-up that prompted the show to solidify into the form it still holds today. Before its cancellation, it was far more obviously a Simpsons clone – slightly smuttier and more obscene, but essentially the same nuclear family format. Afterwards, it became the now-familiar shallow framework functioning as a delivery system for cutaways, references to 80s pop culture, and 50s-era stereotypes. It is this formula that has kept it going for sixteen seasons and three hour-long Star Wars retellings, so judge that how you will.

Rick and Morty does, at times, waver into the same sorts of diminishing returns as those two shows – I cite the episode where they ‘parodied’, that is to say redid, forgettable horror film The Purge. Further, they still lean a bit too heavily on the domestic nuclear family drama which The Simpsons perfected, and which Family Guy has been desperately lumbering after since nearly twenty years ago. This is exacerbated by the fact that, as a rule, they’ve only managed to pull off genuinely heartwarming moments within that domestic setting (as in the season 3 finale), rather than as part of the high-concept sci-fi rigmarole which is the show’s obvious strength. Still, the concept has by no means fallen apart enough that anyone would want to put it out of its misery just yet.

Should the show be cancelled before the end of its self-declared hundred-year lifespan, one would hope the creators get some warning. Greg Garcia’s karma-based comedy My Name Is Earl, knowing their fourth season would be their last, proceeded to end on the biggest cliffhanger they could manage – and Rick and Morty has previously shown its fondness for this kind of biting-the-hand-that-feeds, middle-finger-to-the-viewer humour (“Tune in to Rick and Morty season 3, in, like…a year and a half! Or longer!”). They have at least earned the opportunity to work with their cancellation and make comedy hay from it, rather than having it unceremoniously dropped upon them.