Rick and Morty was supposed to be Harmon’s reward. He’d all but killed himself making
Community, only to feel like he was constantly letting people down. Now, he had a partner in Adult Swim, the nighttime arm of the Cartoon Network, that actively wanted to be in business with him. In fact, executives there had courted him with the promise that they’d love him the way that NBC didn’t. And in the early days, working on
Rick and Morty was blissful, or as blissful as any Dan Harmon production can be. It wasn’t until season two that everything started to change.
Let me back up here and tell you that Harmon has never seen
Rick and Morty as his show. When Adult Swim first approached him, he figured he’d be six episodes and out unless he enlisted a subversive animator like Justin Roiland with big, crazy ideas. He had met Roiland through Channel 101, the experimental film festival that Harmon had founded in the early aughts, between co-creating
Heat Vision and Jack and
The Sarah Silverman Program. “It’s not that I’m bereft of ideas, but I wouldn’t know where to begin,” explains Harmon. “I’m a character person and a story person and an I-just-want-people-to-like-me person.”
It was Roiland who suggested that they revisit one of his zanier shorts, an off-color parody of
Back to the Future’s Marty McFly and Doc Brown, which he’d drawn for Channel 101 back in 2006. Harmon loved the idea, and the two hired their 101 pals to work with them. Initially, there was some pushback from Adult Swim about Roiland voicing both leads — in this case, a narcissistic, alcoholic genius (Rick) and his bumbling grandson (Morty) — but the network ultimately caved and the series premiered to widespread critical praise in 2013. And though the pair shares a co-creator credit, Harmon has always been sensitive to Roiland’s contributions. After all, they were his voices and his characters, even if many of the show’s writers suggest they’ve modeled Rick after Harmon. (Not all of them, however. Heather Anne Campbell, who joined the show in 2020, says the two have diverged over time: “Rick may be very intelligent and caustically funny like Dan, but the character is a callous, terrified man and, at least in the time I’ve been working here, Dan is open and almost recursively self-aware.”)
What happened next still rattles Harmon, which is one of the reasons he’s never publicly addressed it until now. When the show scored its second season, Harmon was eager to staff up, filling out their ragtag cable team with Harvard-educated
Community writers. If they were going to make a play for network primetime audiences, he reasoned, they’d need network primetime writers. “If I had felt like I was imposing something, I would have never done it,” he says, having played the whole thing back in his head countless times over the past decade. He can see now how Roiland must have felt that that transition was about making the show more Harmon’s than his, but he insists that was not his intent.
“If anything, what I wanted was for Justin and I both to be able to be increasingly lazy and not show up for work. That was the dream,” says Harmon. “We’d be these rich idea men. He could roll around and go, like, ‘What if a genie had a butt instead of a dick?’ And I could be like, ‘Yeah, and plus, we’re going to make people cry about it, and that’s going to make them freak out. It’s a story about a genie butt dick, but then we’d win an Emmy, and it’d be more ironic than ever.’ And then I’d come to find out later that it was like, ‘Oh, Harmon brought in his Harmon writers,’ and, man, that is not how I saw it.”
Roiland started to pull back during season two. By then, the room was working considerably longer hours, as Harmon obsessed over the show’s quality, and the environment was no longer
as much fun. After the season wrapped, Roiland sat down with Harmon and acknowledged just how miserable he’d become working at the show. The implication, according to Harmon, was that it was his fault. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure what he was saying,” recalls Harmon, “other than, maybe, ‘I feel like I’m in your shadow and I wish I wasn’t.’ ”
Mike Lazzo, who was running Adult Swim out of Atlanta at the time, was aware of the growing tensions insomuch as he’d see signs when he came to visit. “Dan would be in the writers room and Justin would be running radio control cars around the studio,” says Lazzo, who gives Harmon the lion’s share of the credit for
Rick and Morty’s success: “It’s so dependent on writing and character, and those are Dan’s strengths. I remember I’d get frustrated waiting on his scripts, but then they’d arrive and they would be masterpieces.”
At some point in season three, Roiland simply stopped showing up. A mediator was ultimately brought in, but the exercise went nowhere. “I always felt like Justin wanted everybody to make him feel more comfortable, and I was just like, ‘Everybody wants to make you comfortable, communicate, tell us how to do that,’ ” says Harmon, who acknowledges: “I was freaking out about the whole thing because I wanted the partnership to function. I wanted him happy because when he’s happy, we have a hit on our hands.”
As drama
waged behind the scenes, the show’s ratings continued to soar.
Rick and Morty had quickly become the most viewed comedy among millennials in all of television. It was easily the most watched series in Adult Swim’s history. After season three, the two even managed to put their differences aside long enough to secure an additional 70 episodes, which was more than double the amount that had already aired. “It was like Justin and I were in love again, because we were dealing with the powers that be and talking about how rich we might be if we negotiated together,” says Harmon. But the moment was short-lived.
The last time he and Roiland spoke was over text in 2019, a conversation that left Harmon in tears. “He said things that he’d never said before about being unhappy, and I remember saying to him the last time we spoke in person, like, ‘I am worried about you, and I don’t know what to do about that except to give you all the string and also just say I’m scared that you’re not going to come back.’ But then this conversation became unprecedentedly confrontational.” Harmon stops himself there. “I think that’s as far as I get to take the story. At that point, we’re no longer both there for it, and it starts to become not only unfair for me to continue but totally uncomfortable because, from there, a friendship goes away, and I still don’t fully understand why.”
The 70-episode deal proved transformative for the show and for Harmon, who used the opportunity to hire “a real showrunner” in Scott Marder. As Harmon explains it now, Marder brought a level of professionalism and structure to a production that sorely needed it, and it enabled him to relax his grip for the first time in his career.
Rick and Morty writer Rob Schrab, whose friendship with Harmon dates back to their time on the Milwaukee comedy circuit, insists it was one of the smartest moves he’s made. “Dan is great as the person that’s going to sit on top of the mountain demanding quality, but the day-to-day management of the show needs to be done by somebody with a very special skill set,” says Schrab. “Honestly, I don’t think there’d still be a
Rick and Morty if it weren’t for Scott Marder.”
The way that
Rick and Morty is run now, Harmon believes it could mirror
The Simpsons and continue for decades — though they’ve only aired 30 of the 70 episodes, and he’s been around the business long enough to know that nothing is promised. Adult Swim’s latest owner, Warner Bros., and its CEO, David Zaslav, whom Harmon has not yet met, could decide to pull the plug tomorrow. And in fact, there was a moment, earlier this year, when that felt plausible in a way that it never had before.
On Jan. 12,
NBC News reported that Roiland had been charged with felony domestic violence in connection with a 2020 incident, which sent everyone involved with the show, many of whom have never actually met Roiland, into a tailspin. Roiland was later cleared of the charges due to insufficient evidence, but Adult Swim had already severed ties with him. When
Rick and Morty returns for its seventh season Oct. 15, it will do so without Roiland’s voice. They’ve hired two young, unknown voice actors for the roles of Rick and Morty, a process that Harmon says he largely avoided, mostly out of denial. “It’s all just sad because the goal is for it to be indistinguishable,” he says, “at the same time, it would be absurd to suddenly decide that the entire foundation of your creative project was, oh, coincidentally, unimportant.”
But a few days after my time with Harmon, the same outlet published a
new report featuring nine separate accounts of Roiland’s alleged misconduct, which range from sexual harassment to sexual assault. To lure these women, Roiland, who has denied the allegations, reportedly leveraged his affiliation with the show and its success on social media apps and on dating apps. When Harmon and I connect again, more than a week later, he’s read the piece and he can no longer stay quiet.
“The easiest thing for me to say about Justin has been nothing. Easy because he isolated so well and easy because I’m nobody’s first choice as a judge of anything or anyone. This is where I’d love to change the subject to myself, to what a piece of crap I’ve been my whole public life,” he says. “I would feel so safe and comfortable making this about me, but that trick is worthless here and dangerous to others. It’s other people’s safety and comfort that got damaged while I obsessed over a cartoon’s quality. Trust has now been violated between countless people and a show designed to please them. I’m frustrated, ashamed and heartbroken that a lot of hard work, joy and passion can be leveraged to exploit and harm strangers.”