As Rick and Morty is set to wrap up season eight with Sunday’s finale, co-creator Dan Harmon somehow isn’t as stressed about working on future episodes as he might have been in the past.
During The Hollywood Reporter’s video interview with the Adult Swim show’s team from San Diego Comic-Con, Harmon was asked if he has favorite moments from the current season.
“I’m really bad at keeping track these days because we’re so on schedule that we’re ahead of schedule,” Harmon says. “I was told last night that at Comic-Con, we will be doing a table read of the two Beths episode [which was season eight’s sixth episode]. My response was very sincerely, ‘Maybe I should punch that script up.’ And [executive producer] Steve Levy said, ‘It already aired on television.’ I’ve become my own Chevy Chase now.”
This is clearly a new side of Harmon, who has previously been quite open with THR about his perfectionism and struggles over being willing to stop tinkering with an episode.
“Definitely very new, very alien,” Harmon admits about being ahead of schedule. “I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat going, ‘How do I destroy everything? How do I slow it down?’ The answer is, I can’t.”
Indeed, the series that is led by showrunner Scott Marder has already started recording voice work for season nine, and the writing team has even started work for the season after that. “There’s episodes of season 10 that I’m already so excited about, and that’s a frustrating thing of being on schedule in animation: ‘Can we fast-forward time so people can get a look at this bad boy?’” jokes Harmon.
He adds about the show being so far in advance, “I don’t know if that’s sad for the listeners to hear. They’re like, ‘Why are you three years ahead?’ That means that you’re not going to get that amazing [Jeffrey] Epstein episode. We’re not going to have hot-topic stuff. We stay timeless.”
One of this season’s viral moments was the cameos from filmmakers James Gunn and Zack Snyder. “Zack Snyder wants to be a regular,” Harmon shared. He jokingly teased, “All of his sequences will be dreams. He’ll always exist in a Snyder cut of every episode.”
Part of the appeal of Rick and Morty for its dedicated fan base is the serialized nature of some of the episodes, as viewers learn about the show’s multiverse and meet various versions of the titular characters. Some fans have noted that season eight appeared to have more of an emphasis on episodic adventures rather than expanding on the bigger picture.
“It is tough,” says Harmon of balancing serialization with episodic fun. “My part of it is, I’ll just always insist on the modular one-off thing. That is harder to pull off and therefore requires more energy. And serialization is a glorious, wonderful thing that happens automatically to a show that people love. So it doesn’t really need help.”
He continues, “But we do have younger, smarter people on the staff whose very job is to remember which Rick is from which dimension. They make great, strong advocates for fantastic and canonical mythical episodes. And so my job can be like, ‘Hey, let’s make this ALF‘ — just my definition of a really modular show.”