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Notes -
Anyone watched Solar Opposites? It's a Justin Roiland cartoon with a similar look to Rick & Morty but is a lot lighter and more fun. It doesn't suffer from the euphoric, grimdark, nihilistic worldview I dislike in Rick & Morty. I was pleasantly surprised by the ongoing subplot that is woven into the show as well. It's a good "serious" counterbalance to the total silliness of the main plot.
Interesting because the sheer silliness of Rick and Morty is the prime reason why I haven't been able to get into it. I'm very comfortable with entertainment that plays with themes of existential dread and nihilism (SOMA, Blindsight and It's Such A Beautiful Day being some of the examples I enjoy the most).
The problem for me is that the best media that tackles these themes actually drive their point home and makes you feel it in your gut on a deep level. R&M on the other hand exists on so many levels of silly absurdist irony that any of the themes it wants to convey often get completely defanged in the process, and it leans so far into it that most of the scenes with any amount of seriousness to them end up suffering because they don't feel like a natural extension of what was occurring before. Also, sometimes the characters just straight-up spout "Nothing matters" quotes which seems overly on-the-nose to me. Outright spelling out your themes to the audience like that is generally a bad idea.
With regards to the immorality of the characters that you mentioned, I would agree that the characters are not people you should look up to, but I actually think the show hammers this home pretty abundantly. I don't think this element of R&M undermines the show, either - I think fiction that's filled with amoral characters or even downright terrible people can be fine pieces of entertainment which are all the better because of the moral greyness of the world presented. Shows like Breaking Bad, films like Joker and books like Blood Meridian are prime examples of this. Rather, R&M simply fails at properly conveying the themes it's based around, and presents it in a 100-levels-of-irony manner which I really can't help but tire of extremely quickly.
Completely agree.
In addition to the moral grayness, these works treat seriously the terrible emptiness and horror of deep cynicism and nihilism. R&M (the show) comes across as a college freshman level take, the work of someone who has lived a comfortable life and who wears nihilism as a fashion accessory rather than of someone who has peered deep into the human soul and seen despair, loneliness, and the twisted curvature into one's own self, consumption by one's own vices. Which is probably okay because R&M is at root supposed to be a silly cartoon. But it still sometimes pretends to be more than it is.
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