Rick and Morty (season 3)

• Justin Roiland as Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith, the two main characters of the show; Rick is an eccentric mad scientist and Morty is his kind but easily distressed grandson[2]
• Chris Parnell as Jerry Smith, Rick's son-in-law and Morty's father; a simple-minded and insecure person, who disapproves of Rick's influence over his family.[2]
• Spencer Grammer as Summer Smith, Rick's granddaughter and Morty's sister; a conventional teenager who worries about improving her status among her peers.[2]
• Sarah Chalke as Beth Smith, Rick's daughter and Morty's mother; a generally level-headed person, who is dissatisfied with her marriage.[2]

Other cast members of the season, who each have voiced one or more characters, include: Dan Harmon, Brandon Johnson, Tom Kenny, Maurice LaMarche, Nolan North, Cassie Steele, Kari Wahlgren, Laura Bailey, John DiMaggio, Ryan Ridley, Scott Chernoff, Dan Benson, Clancy Brown, Echo Kellum, Melique Berger, William Holmes, Tara Strong, Jeff B. Davis, Jonas Briedis, Phil Hendrie, Rob Paulsen, Alex Jayne Go, Jennifer Hale and Mariana Wise.

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon

Adult Swim renewed Rick and Morty for a third season on August 12, 2015, shortly after a successful second-season premiere.[21] Talking about the renewal, the two co-creators and executive producers expressed their delight at the series' popularity. Dan Harmon stated that it is "an honor to see Rick and Morty join the exclusive club of shows with over nineteen episodes", and Justin Roiland added "I am blown away by the seemingly instant success of Rick and Morty. I look forward to continuing their adventures!"[22]

In an October 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Roiland revealed that the team had received a lot of scripts from female writers for the upcoming season, which had never happened before. He stated that "We've gone from having zero spec scripts [in the running from female] candidates, to having five or six of them, so it's looking very likely that season three will have one, potentially two gals in the room."[23] Eventually, four female writers were added to the staff, and—counting out the co-creators of the show, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon—the writing room for the third season was gender-balanced.[24]

The writing staff consisted of eleven writers, who collectively wrote and repeatedly rewrote each episode.[25] Harmon noted that the writers' ideas were blended and refined during the writing process, and that the name of the writer that appeared in the opening credits of an episode is usually that of the person who had been assigned to prepare the episode's outline.[26] Sarah Carbiener, one of the new female writers, said that she managed to learn many things from her experience as a member of the writing team. She explained that a story that for other shows would have been an entire episode, for Rick and Morty it will be only its first few minutes. Therefore, the team had to write a large amount of story in a very short time.[25]

Writing began on November 2, 2015,[27] and the first episode was recorded on February 18, 2016.[28] In July 2016, already behind on schedule, the production team admitted that the success of the series had increased pressure to meet the expectations of the viewers. The creative freedom provided by Adult Swim entailed taking responsibility for product quality, and as the bar had risen higher, work had become harder, improvements were constantly being sought, and this often resulted in delays. Harmon told the assembled press at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con that "it’s not an endless perfectionism because you know when something finally clicks and you go 'this is a good episode of TV.'" He added that the animators had to suffer the worst part of the schedule delays, as they were forced to work weekends in order to cope with the demanding workload.[29]

Screenshot of a "Pickle Rick" animatic

In September 2016, the writing team had finished writing new episodes and they were waiting on their return from Bardel Entertainment, Rick and Morty's Canadian animation studio, for in-house screenings. After the animatics (video recorded versions of a hand-drawn storyboard with very limited motion) for each episode were made, and the production team was able to pre-visualize the animation, additional passes on the scripts would follow.[25] In an interview with The Detroit Cast, writer Ryan Ridley revealed that the writing process for the third season was completed in November 2016, and noted that a season of Rick and Morty takes a long time to write and animate.[30]

In February 2017, Harmon announced on his podcast, Harmontown, that the season was in the animation process, after a long period of writing.[31] Around the same time, Bardel Entertainment's production supervisor Mark Van Ee confirmed that "everything is on track."[32] In June 2017, when production of the season had been completed, Harmon wrote a series of posts on Twitter, where he refuted reports about his disagreements with Roiland being the main cause of the delay, and explained that the writing process took longer than expected to complete because of his perfectionism.[33] As a result, the third season of Rick and Morty consisted of only ten episodes instead of fourteen, as was initially intended.[34]

The season has an approval rating of 96% from Rotten Tomatoes based on 10 reviews, and an average rating of 8.95 out of 10, with the site's consensus:

Rick and Morty dives into new and even kookier cosmic dilemmas in a third season that interrogates familial bonds, love, and nihilism—treating all existential topics to the series' trademark serrated wit.[47]

Jesse Schedeen of IGN described the third season of the show as darker and more unpredictable than the first two, and praised its high-concept storytelling and character development. Schedeen gave the season an 8.8 out of 10 rating, saying that it "didn't quite reach the heights of Season 2, but it is the series' most consistently entertaining and ambitious season yet".[48] Holding a similar position, Corey Plante of Inverse said that Rick and Morty managed to be both dark and funny in its third season.[49] Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club agreed that this was the darkest season of Rick and Morty, though he noted that the viewers have become desensitized to the show's violence.

In previous seasons, the show managed a balance between self-mockery and honest joy in absurd scenarios. That joy is still there, more or less, but there’s a bitterness to it that’s harder and harder to ignore.[50]

Mike Cosimano of Comics Gaming Magazine did not think that the third season was dark; he said that it used "cheap gut punches to elicit that very reaction". He added that too many of the season's episodes were weak, since the show focuses on character development only in its first half, resulting in an uneven season. He considered the season to be a disappointment, rating it 6.5 out of 10.[51]

Kayla Cobb of Decider focused on the dynamism displayed by Beth and Summer, as the characters broke the stereotypical conventions of the first two seasons. Cobb stated that "Season 3 is the first time Rick and Morty really handed over the reigns [sic] to its leading ladies, and it was a horrifying delight."[52] Julia Alexander of Polygon highlighted the philosophical conflict between nihilist realism and life in ignorant bliss as the season's main theme, and noted that "after an introspective season built on the importance of self-realization and reflection, Rick and Morty's third year ended on a total reset," with Beth and the kids reuniting with Jerry in the season-finale, as they seek comfort through escapism and ignore the realities of their lives.[53] Zack Handlen considered Jerry's return to be an anticlimax and "a necessary corrective to an arc that was in danger of going off the rails completely". Handlen appeared skeptical about Beth's statement in the final episode, that from this point things will be like season one again, saying that "the problem with going as far as season three went is that bridges stay burned."[50]

Ratings for the third season of Rick and Morty.

  Unannounced premiere   Weekly episodes

Rick and Morty completed its third season with overall viewership numbers increased by 81% over the previous season,[54] and delivered the highest ratings in Adult Swim's history.[55] Rick and Morty was the most popular television comedy within the 18–24 and 18–34 age ranges in the United States, based on "Live+7" ratings data spanning from December 2016 to September 2017.[56] This rating system tracks live viewership plus streaming and on-demand viewing over an initial week-long period, and provides a more accurate picture of delayed viewing as compared to "Live+Same Day" ratings.[57] Considering that episodes of the third season originally aired at 11:30 p.m. on Sundays, it is very likely that people would have watched them on-demand the next day or several days later.[56]

Christina Miller, the president of Adult Swim, told Fortune that Rick and Morty "goes beyond just appealing to millennials," as numbers suggest that people of all ages are watching the show.[54] The second episode of the season, which aired nearly four months after the unannounced premiere, was the season's most-watched episode with 2.86 million viewers, and the second-best on cable for the day it aired in adults 18–49, behind the weekly episode of Game of Thrones.[11] The season finale was watched by 2.6 million live plus same day viewers and it was the most-watched telecast across all age groups.[58]

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, female writers Jane Becker, Sarah Carbiener and Jessica Gao addressed negative comments regarding their involvement in writing the third season of Rick and Morty, recalling a post on Reddit that called them "the social justice warriors that Dan had to hire". Gao stated:

The people who say [hiring writers should be a meritocracy] have never ever thought about what that actually means and where that meritocracy comes from.[59]

Following the release of "Pickle Rick", one of the season's best-rated episodes, a number of fans participated in an online harassment campaign that targeted female writers of the show—especially Jane Becker and Jessica Gao—as they felt that they were "ruining the show" for them. Said writers received rape and death threats on Twitter, and had their personal information put online.[60] In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Dan Harmon confronted the trolls, saying:

I think it’s all disgusting. These knobs, that want to protect the content they think they own—and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender.[61]

A packet of Szechuan sauce

The Szechuan sauce reference in the season premiere brought huge online attention for McDonald's discontinued promotional product.[62] Internet memes spread rapidly on Reddit and Twitter,[63] more than 40,000 people signed a petition at Change.org, asking for the return of the sauce,[64] while an eBay auction resulted in a 20-year-old packet of this teriyaki sauce being sold for $14,700.[65] On October 7, 2017, McDonald's served limited quantities of the sauce, without explicitly naming Rick and Morty as a reason for the return.[66] Many fans waited for hours in long queues, but not all of them were served as the fast-food outlets ran out of the product. The fiasco prompted enraged reactions by disappointed fans, with some of them acting out and mistreating the company's workers.[67]

In the wake of these events, the Rick and Morty fanbase received a bad reputation, with James Grebey of Inverse noting:

Rick and Morty is a good show, but it’s quickly gaining a (frankly well-earned) reputation for having a really, really shitty fan base. Even series co-creator Dan Harmon hates a certain segment of his misogynistic fan base.[68]

Cameron Williams of Junkee attributed this "toxic behavior" to the rise of an aggressive type of entitled fan in the past decades, and examined the motivation of these people, noting:

It’s hard to feel special when you’re a face in the crowd of millions of people. A lot of bad behaving fans look for an excuse to be oppressed so they can separate themselves from the mainstream.[69]

Emily Gaudette of Newsweek said that, with the spike in popularity, the show has obtained an army of online devotees, and commented on groups like the self-described "Real Ricks", who identify themselves with the series' main character and believe that high intellect is an excuse for mistreating others. Gaudette noted that these groups do not represent the Rick and Morty fanbase, but they "tend to suck all the oxygen out of the virtual room."[70] Series co-creator Justin Roiland said on his Twitter account that he sees more good than bad in the series' fanbase, and chooses to focus on that.[71]

Rick and Morty received a total of eight nominations for its third season in 2017 and 2018, of which it won an IGN Award and a Critics' Choice Television Award, both in the categories for "Best Animated Series". Furthermore, the episode "Pickle Rick" received three nominations, of which it won an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Animated Program" and an Annie Award for "Best General Audience Animated Television/Broadcast Production". With two nominations, "The Ricklantis Mixup" was another awarded episode of the season, that won its writers Ryan Ridley and Dan Guterman an Annie Award for "Outstanding Achievement for Writing in an Animated Television/Broadcast Production". Justin Roiland won an IGN Award for "Best Comedic TV Performance", while Christian Slater was nominated for a BTVA Voice Acting Award for his performance in "Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender".