Rick and Morty is a TV powerhouse because millennials are broke … – VICE News

Its hard to find a less likely cultural rallying point than Adult Swims Rick and Morty, the weird, bleak, semi-psychedelic animated show about a misanthropic scientist and his below-average grandson whose world-inverting adventures tend to have an odd tinge of nihilism. But its the nihilism that makes the show such a relief to watch.

Rick and Morty is often horrifyingly violent, and its family dynamics are a defiantly unpleasant reversal of the classic will-they-or-wont-they romantic tension: Instead, we root for characters to get divorced for their sakes and for their children. Thematically, suicide looms large.

And yet the show is not just a cult hit, but an astonishing financial success. Among young men, the show washigher-rated than anything running on broadcast TV during its first season. As the network begins its marketing push toward a third season, set for later this summer, the series has quietly become a big-enough deal that there is atraveling merch van shaped like Ricks body touring the country, selling swag that fanswait in line for hours to buy.

There are a lot of answers, none of them particularly satisfying, to the question of what makes a hit, but as so much in the world goes so wrong so quickly, a lot of previously good jokes seem to have expired, or retained only nostalgia value. Rick and Morty, with its queasy blend of high-minded brutality and unusual kindness, is something new.

The show is the work of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, who often use old sci-fi cliches forced into different shapes to bizarre and hypnotic effect. Harmons casual mastery of the sitcom formula was a compelling reason to watch his under-loved live-action sitcom Community; Roiland is something between a protg and a partner on Rick and Morty, having developed the title characters, both of whom he voices, in Harmons digital TV workshop, Channel 101.

At full wattage, the showviciously smashes the world only to see it restored to its old, troubled state in some unsettling way, by hopping into a dimension where our heroes doppelgngers have just died in a grisly accident, or having nigh-omniscient house pets abandon their plans to enslave humanity for fear of becoming too much like us.

But for a show with a nonzero number of alien testicle monsters, the characters in Rick and Morty respond to unknowable cosmic tragedy in recognizable, even existential ways, sometimes with heartbreaking honesty. WHAT IS MY PURPOSE? asks a robot Rick invents to pass him some butter. You pass butter, Rick replies. The robot looks at its hands and finally sees them for what they are: butter passers. OH MY GOD, it replies. Rick and Mortys dilemmas are hilarious and absurd, but its characters desperation is real, and that may help explain its appeal to a demographic that barely even haveTVs anymore.

Goldman Sachs christened millennials the renter generation in a recent report, observing that theyre simply not buying houses, cars, or durable goods such as refrigerators and washing machines at the rates their parents did. Since the recession, the median wage for every industry except health care, with its increasing demand from aging boomers, has fallen for people 34 and under. This is another reason its so remarkable to see a show on basic cable attract millennials: Far fewer of them subscribe to cable at all.

Greed has destroyed the [cable] value proposition, wrote industry analyst Rich Greenfield in a research note last week. The target demo for Rick and Morty thinks twice about buying a TV, let alone a Time Warner subscription.

This financial trend is actually visible within Rick and Morty episodes. Young people avoid ads, so companies trying to reach them often use product placement, and brands that cant sell to young people simply abandon them (try to find a Lexus ad for people under 40). Thus, product placement in Rick and Morty is a handy index of brands that are OK with poor people: Wheat Thins, Cold Stone Creamery, Shoneys, McDonalds. No Whirlpool, no Infiniti, little financial services or real estate. Thats stuff for people who arent afraid of living under a bridge, and who dont need an inoculation of despair with their dinnertime half-hour comedy.

When Rick tells his daughter that emotionally speaking, honey, Shoneys is my home, were not just laughing at Rick; were laughing at Shoneys, too. Who could be at home, emotionally speaking, in a restaurant you go to when Applebees is closed due to flood damage? A lot of us, actually.

A few weeks ago, Adult Swim debuted one episode of season 3 on April Fools Day as a sort of anti-prank. The internet loved jokes about a discontinued McDonalds menu item (yay,brand synergy) but in fact the shows punchline was that Rick collapses the interstellar economy by hacking into the Galactic Federations central servers, recalling the financial crisis, which presumably means more jobs in food service on an interstellar level.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy, but if you dont have time, light-years will do.

Though Rick is the shows omniscient guru, its Morty who puts it best, when he tries to explain to his sister that he and Rick managed to destroy their entire universe with a botched love potion and had to hide out in hers because her Rick and Morty had just died. The moral?

Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybodys gonna die, he tells her. Come watch TV.

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Rick and Morty is a TV powerhouse because millennials are broke ... - VICE News