Rick and Morty Got Insufferable

There’s that moment with every show where it stops being fun to like because the people who like it have decided it proves something about them. For Rick and Morty, I think it was when the Pickle Rick episode dropped and the fandom realized they could use it as proof they were smarter, weirder, more enlightened than everyone else. By the time actual news stories were running about McDonald’s sauce shortages, the show had lost me entirely, even though technically it hadn’t really done anything wrong.

Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland made something genuinely strange in the beginning. An old man who drinks too much and doesn’t care about anything, dragging his terrified grandson through a multiverse where nothing matters and everything is broken. The animation was cheap and deliberately wrong. The jokes came from nowhere. It felt like something genuinely unhinged had somehow slipped past the network’s radar, made by people who understood internet culture well enough not to explain it.

Then the fandom decided it was membership in an exclusive club. Pickle Rick wasn’t just a funny absurd bit—it became evidence that you were intelligent enough to appreciate it. The sauce obsession. The endless discourse about what things meant, whether you were smart enough to get it. They turned the whole thing into a test you could pass by liking it, which is exactly what the show’s actually about—how pointless and isolating it is to think you’re smarter than other people.

The episodes themselves stayed weird and inventive. Roiland’s voice work never wavered. The ideas kept coming. But I couldn’t talk about the show the way I used to. That’s what the fandom cost it—not the quality of the thing itself, but the simple pleasure of watching something you like without feeling like you have to defend yourself for it.