Rick and Morty’s Season 7 recast is the least of its problems

I wrote about Lower Decks last week, about how its reputation as essentially the Rick and Mortification of Star Trek still puts a lot of Trekkies off, despite the fact that it’s the best Trek show since the mid-nineties. Rick and Morty itself is subject to a similar issue: it’s one of the best adult animations around, and yet, it’s almost embarrassing to bring it up in polite company.

That some people see Lower Decks’ clear debt to Rick and Morty as an inherent Bad Thing is incongruous with the fact that both shows are doing pretty well. LD’s fifth season, currently in development, was greenlit months before season 4 premiered. Rick and Morty started off as a ratings smash, and retained impressive numbers for years thereafter. Not many shows get to their seventh season, let alone with a healthy portion of their peak audience still sticking around.

And it hasn’t been an easy road for Rick and Morty. It survived both the 2020 covid pandemic, the 2023 writers strike, and the subsequent actors strike. And it has survived having to recast its titular characters following the original voice actor’s dismissal from the show in the wake of several sexual abuse and impropriety scandals. Any one of these things could kill a show stone dead. The pandemic alone axed more projects than a team of Hollywood execs could in their wildest dreams.