Rick & Morty Is Turning Into The Simpsons (& That's A Good Thing)

As "Rick and Morty" enters its seventh season, with brand new voice actors in its titular roles, it's worth asking — what happens to a beloved animated series as it ages? 

Most sitcoms have a lifespan determined primarily by the ages of their cast members, a fact that sits in tension with their other defining trait — a status quo that never meaningfully changes. "Seinfeld," "The Big Bang Theory," and other massively popular shows couldn't go on forever because at some point, it would have meant seeing Jason Alexander or Jim Parsons aging out of the shenanigans which compelled audiences to return week after week to witness (then again, it looks like "Seinfeld" is gearing up for a reunion, so who knows). Animated series, though, don't have that problem. Cartoon characters don't need to age, even if their voice actors do.

When we look at the pattern an animated sitcom follows as it grows older, we can see that "Rick and Morty" is joining the ranks of those older shows. Characters on "The Simpsons," "Family Guy," or "South Park" might not age, but the shows themselves do. While their early and most influential years are spent innovating a new comedic formula, later seasons enter a sort of "institutional age," defined by structural predictability. In an institution, like a government agency or a historic newspaper, staff may change over the years, but the guiding principles remains steady. You can read a New York Times article from 50 years ago and find the same tone and style as one from today. 

Similarly, an animated show like "The Simpsons" isn't breaking new ground anymore, but audiences keep returning for a dose of the familiar. Once fresh and original, such programs become comfort TV. They don't change, but we do. And "Rick and Morty" has become an institution.

Behind the scenes of any long-running animated sitcom, the machinery changes over the years. Writers, voice actors, and even showrunners get swapped out. But what gets presented to the audience tends to remain consistent. Homer will always be lazy and love doughnuts. Stan Marsh will always be the voice of reason. In a sense, the cartoon characters on our screens become masks in a Commedia dell'Arte. Anyone can wear them, and we recognize the mask, not the person underneath.

Because of the changing creative staff, any series that hopes to carry on for a decade or more must necessarily develop a structural formula for its episodes. A deviation from the status quo is introduced, the characters respond to it, and a resolution is reached, or a lesson learned, resetting the status quo for next week's episode. Despite the chaotic qualities "Rick and Morty" is known for, there is perhaps no more stringently structured series. Co-creator Dan Harmon famously sticks to his "story circle," a variation of the so-called monomyth proposed by 20th century literary scholar Joseph Campbell. This is, as Harmon explained on Adult Swim, "My attempt to remove all of the hard and repeated work from the task of breaking a story." Some would call repeated story beats a rut, but they're the key to maintaining a show indefinitely.

From that perspective, the replacement of a voice actor, even one who was the show's co-creator, is somewhat trivial. Harmon's story circle formula, like the formulas employed by other animated sitcoms that stood the test of time, can be used by any of its writers. In fact, episodes written solely by either creator were rare, even before the recast.

Maturing into its formula doesn't mean "Rick and Morty" has lost the capacity to dazzle audiences — just that we expect to be dazzled. In a media landscape where we feel like we've seen everything, undue emphasis gets placed on originality. That's why "Rick and Morty" received so much attention and praise during its first several seasons. It seemed to be bursting at the seams with big ideas. It was willing to treat premises that other shows would have stretched out across episodes (or seasons!) as blink-and-you'll-miss-it throwaway gags. Whatever gadget or alien life Rick was about to deal with, you could be sure of its inventiveness.

But that same quality has made "Rick and Morty" predictable. Predictably surprising, to be sure, but when Rick spends an episode dissecting the episode's own metanarrative, as in Season 6's "Full Meta Jackrick," we know how the game works because we've seen Season 4's "Never Ricking Morty."

Again, this isn't a flaw in the series. It retains the same qualities it always has. It's simply that instead of perceiving those qualities as innovative and surprising, we've come to expect them. The same way we expect Homer Simpson to love doughnuts or Peter Griffin to be a moron, we expect Rick Sanchez to be too smart for the universe to contain. At some point, a series needs to recognize that there are no new lands to be conquered, no new mountains to climb, and that it's time to stand on what you've already accomplished. If you don't recognize your institutional period, you'll go off the rails.

Rick & Morty narrowly avoided the sitcom trope of Flanderizing its characters, a term colloquially used to describe the way sitcom characters (e.g., Ned Flanders) tend to be engulfed by their most prominent personality traits. For the first several seasons, the main cast—especially Rick and Jerry—were at risk of being totally Flanderized. For Rick, that meant he became a nearly invincible god, a trend that accelerated in Season 3. For Jerry, it meant becoming more hapless and meeker than we'd ever seen him. In Season 2, he turned into a literal worm during alien couple's therapy, but by Season 4, he's filling his pants with rainwater to weight them down because he can't be trusted with the power of levitation.

Flanderization is a term that developed because the phenomenon was most pronounced on "The Simpsons," but "Rick and Morty" has managed to deal with it early. It's not an uncommon opinion among fans that "Rick and Morty" fell into a slump during Seasons 4 and 5, but at the end of Season 5, we saw a sea change as it was revealed that Rick is only so powerful because he created a temporal boundary called the Central Finite Curve to close off any universe where he's not the smartest being. This allowed Season 6 to be a complete rebound — smashing the Curve and allowing Rick to fail again. Jerry got to be a superhero for a hot minute, and he didn't completely suck at it. Summer gets to do a "Die-Hard," and Beth/Space Beth got to develop as characters. All of this happens while episodes build upon the show's storytelling formula.

What's happening to "Rick and Morty" might just be the best outcome of a show's institutional era. Institutions can too easily hollow out, repeating their formulas ad infinitum without any passion: "South Park" and "Family Guy" are unfortunate examples. "Rick and Morty," on the other hand, has figured out how to evolve within itself, a kind of maturity that's rare in the genre.

Dan Harmon's previous sitcom, "Community," gives us a look at the fate "Rick and Morty" nearly suffered. Harmon's plan had been summed up by the infamous slogan, "six seasons and a movie," but although the series limped to the first of those goals, the second hasn't yet materialized. Partway through the show's run, the cast began to splinter apart. Chevy Chase, who played Pierce Hawthorne, was so unpleasant to work with he was written off the show, leaving before Season 5. Donald Glover, as a rising hip-hop star, departed from his role as Troy Barnes to focus on other opportunities. Though the later seasons have their gems, "Community" never really recovered from such losses.

Such a fate threatened to befall "Rick and Morty" when Justin Roiland fell from public grace and was fired. But cartoons, as we've established, are like masks. New voice actors were able to don them. The show will hardly change at all. Rick has broken the fourth wall a few times to promise fans 100 years of "Rick and Morty," and if the series continues on the same track it's been on, that promise might just come true.