Though a grueling writing process delayed Rick and Morty Season 3, there have been indications that Season 4 may have a quicker turnaround. In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, co-creator Dan Harmon claimed to have learned some lessons from the Season 3 delays, telling EW, “My obsessiveness is an enemy that needs to be fought,” theoretically embracing a more and fast and loose writing environment. Harmon even suggested some concepts from the writing of Season 3 could easily port into Season 4. “We have a pretty hefty shoebox from Season 3 of ideas that are ready to go. Some are fully written, in fact,” he said.
But while the writing process may be less painful, the Season 4 premiere depends upon that process actually, uh, beginning. An early December episode of The Detroit Cast podcast that featured an interview with Rick and Morty writer and producer Ryan Ridley suggests that they’ve yet to set those wheels in motion.
“As far as I know, no one is working on the show. I’m certainly not. So I don’t know what’s going on. I haven’t heard anything. Yeah, they really take their time. I’ve never understood why all parties — Dan, Justin and Adult Swim — didn’t get their shit together and make the show fast. I just don’t get it. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m sure they all have their reasons,” Ridley said.
With an approximate eight-month turnaround for animation, it looks unlikely that Rick and Morty Season 4 will premiere this year. Ridley quickly pushed back on the suggestion that Rick and Morty may never regroup for Season 4, however. “I highly doubt there won’t be, I’m just shocked that it’s taken — we got done writing Season 3 in November of last year and here we are, 11 months later. And then I know how long the show takes to write, let alone animate, so I’d be surprised if there was a fourth season on the air any sooner than 2019, late 2019,” Ridley said. “Yeah, it’s crazy. Get your shit together. Get all your shit together and put it in a backpack.”
It’s going to be a long wait. But it’s also possible that development on Rick and Morty Season 4 has begun since this interview was recorded. Here’s series writer and producer Mike McMahan on Twitter, suggesting he’s back at it:
I tried to get back in the swing of work today and it almost killed me. My “work” is writing sci-fi dick jokes. I can’t imagine how people with actual work are holding up.
— Mike McMahan (@MikeMcMahanTM) January 3, 2018
In the podcast, Ridley also shared some other interesting insights into the writing process, including a glimpse into the writers’ attitude toward the “science” in science fiction:
“I imagine nerds are gonna go, ‘That wouldn’t work because the 3rd dimension would fall apart due to X.’ So do you guys even think about that or is it more like ‘ah fuck it, whatever, we just write what we want and go there?’”
“The latter, the ‘ah fuck it’ school of writing. I always heard Futurama were a staff of math nerds and people with engineering degrees and physic backgrounds and they really worked to get all that stuff right. And I’m always like, ‘who has the time for that?’ The truth is, in most of the movies I loved as a kid, all that sci-fi, it doesn’t really hold up. It’s just like, does it hold up from a story logic point of view? Meaning, like, we all know when we’re watching a movie and someone is explaining something and we’re like, ‘What!? That’s stupid!’ vs. ‘Yeah, I dunno, that seems right, that sounds cool.’ Which is, by the way, every time travel movie, because time travel isn’t real and no one knows if it’s possible. All time travel is made-up logic, but just some time travel movies seem to feel right and others you just go, ‘What? I’m too distracted by all the paradoxes this create.’ And so as long as the story stuff feels right. I’ve gotten really frustrated at jobs when people point out logic issues and I go, ‘Trust me when I tell you this — and this isn’t me being like ‘hey nobody cares’ — but nobody is going to care about that little bit of logic if they’re entrusted by a story with an internal story logic,’ which is very different from real-world logic. You can’t build an airplane on story logic and hope it flies, people aren’t going to care. But if the story’s not working because we’re spending too much time focusing on the detail, then all they’re going to care about is ‘wait, what, that’s dumb,’ because they’re not caught up in the story.”
The full interview also dives into the influence of The Simpsons , how credits in TV writing work and how a gender-balanced team of writers has worked out for Rick and Morty . Listen to it here.
