23-05-2025
Rick and Morty season 8 is familiar high concept, stupid execution hijinks
Rick and Morty season 8 is familiar high concept, stupid execution hijinks
Season eight of Rick and Morty is brand new. But you've seen it before.
More than a decade into the Adult Swim staple's run, the cartoon is content to play the hits. The newest season doesn't cover new ground — at least not in the four episodes screened for reviewers this spring. Most are minor tweaks on familiar themes, winking acknowledgement to pop culture references and, as always, lots of high concept sci-fi themes applied to tremendously stupid situations.
And, you know what? It works.
Rick and Morty's eighth season won't inspire the awe and reverence of the early episodes. There's nothing especially original here — no Meeseeks boxes or four-dimensional timecops floating about. Each drills down into characters in ways we've already seen. Beth and Summer struggle to find common ground. Jerry is a punching bag who stumbles into power and squanders it. Morty and Rick clash over morals with disastrous results.
We've seen all this before, right down to the brief drop-in to see what's happening at the Citadel of Ricks that sidelines our main characters to examine the center of the multiverse. As always, it's fun to see new variants on familiar folks (and bang-up fodder for the Pocket Mortys mobile game), but the notes are the same even if the name of the song has changed. Some Ricks are sheep. Others care more about their Mortys. The former is stronger than the latter — a continuation on a riff that could have been retired last season after the unceremonious death of Rick Prime.
So instead of watching a rising young band dominate the charts, you're stuck with the state fair equivalent of a venerated group playing the classics with a few minor new wrinkles throughout the show. It's the cartoon version of your childhood bedroom, a soothing and familiar spot that isn't going to challenge you or make you think too hard about the world, but remains nice to revisit. Rick and Morty is leaning into its own nostalgia, either on purpose or because it's running low on ideas 70-plus episodes in.
That's fine! You just have to come into Rick and Morty's new season understanding it's comfort food rather than a steak dinner. It's late-stage Scrubs or The Office after Idris Elba disappeared but before Steve Carell did. Want to see Morty's conscience screw up a mission? Season eight's got that. Want riffs on pop culture so obvious the show explicitly points them out? Yep. A healthy dose of body horror and pixelated old man nudity? That, too!
This is all part of the natural circle of television. Rick and Morty isn't quite cannibalizing itself, but its circle has stopped expanding. It's turned inward in search of new stories. That's fine for standard laughs, but brutal for innovation and growth.
And, sure, it's a cartoon. But Rick and Morty's greatest value was its ability to wrap smart ideas in crude paper and relate them to basic tenets of humanity. The four episodes I watched try to return to that well, but with nothing new to say there's nothing that lands even close to the simple truth of "nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, were all going to die. Come watch TV..." even if that quote is nearly a decade old and, yes, pretty much cribbed from Nietzsche to begin with.
We're left with a hangout show. A funny one with a few interesting ideas but plenty that have been done before, either internally or elsewhere (including an Easter episode where we figure out how Jesus and eggs mix). It's fine. It's totally enjoyable television. It's got more of a shut-your-brain-off and watch feel than any of the seven seasons that enjoyed it, and there's value to that.
It's just, well, extremely familiar.
