Rick And Morty is an inherently ambitious show, sending its genius mad scientist “hero” and his hapless grandson flying across the universe and into whatever new sci-fi riffs its writers can dream up on any given day. Sometimes, though, the series gets a little too ambitious (especially on the production side), like when co-creator Dan Harmon promised last year that the show’s third season would move up to a 14 episode schedule from the previous year’s 10. Thanks to self-admitted perfectionism from both Harmon and co-creator Justin Roiland, that didn’t happen, and the show’s third season will end with its tenth episode this Sunday.
None of which has stopped Harmon from trying again, according to an Entertainment Weekly interview that went up yesterday. Harmon—who’s vocally still smarting from the fact that season 3 is when he started to lose his handle on his last series, NBC’s Community—says he’s hoping that Rick And Morty is finally settling into a groove that will allow season four to be 14 episodes long. The trick, apparently, is to be more open to the concept of “good enough”; Harmon explicitly cited season two’s “Look Who’s Purging Now”—which was produced on a rush order, after the show’s writings staff couldn’t figure out where to take the season’s originally two-part finale—as an example of a happy medium between “absolutely perfect” and “funny enough to air.”
“And that Purge episode is fun and great,” Harmon said in the interview, which also contains his thoughts on Game Of Thrones, the nebulous paradox of character growth, and his previously reported comments on the sexist “knobs” who attack the show’s female writers in an effort to somehow “protect” it. “I can feel it’s ‘good enough’ quality. I think the audience would vote unanimously for the idea of 14 episodes instead of 10 on the condition that 4 of them would be [Purge Planet level] episodes.” (Given the rabidity and self-described elitism of the worst elements of the show’s fanbase, that assertion seems less certain than Harmon might think, although if it gets us more Rick And Morty, we’re happy to see where it goes.)