Four years ago came news that “Rick and Morty” creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon had seen that hit animated series renewed for an additional seventy episodes – effectively through to a tenth season.
Now, ahead of the debut of the show’s sixth season this coming weekend, the pair have indicated there are no signs of burnout on their parts. Roiland tells The Wrap:
“I think the show could run forever. The show could run as long as we want it to… I think we could easily run this thing into Season 20 if we wanted, if the network wanted and if the fans wanted.
Our foundation is so broad. We’ve got the multiverse, we’ve got any sci-fi concept we want. There’s too many ideas, so it wouldn’t be for lack of content in a show like this.”
Harmon agreed, saying in a separate interview with the outlet that the series was never conceived as a show with a definite endpoint which helps avoid issues that come with ongoing storylines:
“As far as the longevity of the show, to me, it just feels infinite. That’s kind of the easy part…
I feel like from Episode 1 forward, there’s always been a commitment in the DNA of the show to not engage in so much soap opera-ness that there’s an inevitable conclusion coming – you know, Mulder is gonna find his sister and he won’t have a reason to do ‘X-Files’ anymore (laughs). We don’t really have that.
We’ve certainly got elements that can only happen once as far as revelations about Rick and stuff like that, but I do believe that the adventures can go on for theoretically 1000 episodes.”
More importantly though, the series production has now finally settled into a schedule to release a season annually. Harmon says:
“We’ll be doing a season a year now. I still don’t understand how that’s possible. But that’s why it never happened on my watch. [Showrunner] Scott [Marder] is able to keep us on a schedule that mostly involves being so ahead of schedule that we can actually release things in a timely manner.”
The sixth season of “Rick and Morty” premieres on Adult Swim on Sunday, September 4th.
