Rick Sanchez, a depressed, alcoholic, abusive, madman (who also happens to be a genius scientist with the ability to travel through dimensions) returns to his daughter Beth's life after two decades of being silent between the two. He finds her married to an incompetent, pathetic man named Jerry, and the couple has two teenage kids. Summer, the oldest girl, is a rebellious teen looking to have more friends at school, and Morty, the youngest child and a boy, is an anxious, quiet, and sweet kid. Rick makes Morty his sidekick and takes him on hilarious Interdimensional adventures, causing poor Morty to become steadily more miserable due to Rick's insane, abusive, and careless additude.
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A throwaway dream sequence in The Rickshank Rickdemption, where Rick rants about a 1998 McDonald's promo tie-in dipping sauce, turned into one of the strangest fandom moments in TV history. When McDonald's actually brought Szechuan Sauce back for one day in October 2017, the tiny supply sent to stores caused genuine chaos, with police called out to calm crowds chanting for more.
The Szechuan Sauce fiasco got so out of hand that McDonald's put out a public apology admitting their limited batch clearly wasn't enough for the demand, and promised a proper, much wider re-release. That relaunch finally happened in February 2018, and this time it went off without a single reported incident.
Roiland actually distanced himself from the whole Szechuan Sauce mess in real time, tweeting that the show had nothing to do with how McDonald's handled the promotion and asking fans to be cool to the employees, since none of it was their fault.
To really nail Rick's drunken cadence, Roiland used to drink water and beer during recording sessions specifically so he could burp mid-line on cue. He apparently took that dedication even further once, recording a session after several shots of tequila and a few beers, and reportedly thought he still sounded too sober and asked for one more round, which the crew flatly refused.
A rough, unfinished animatic of the Pickle Rick sewer sequence was shown off to fans at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2016, a full year before the finished episode actually aired on Adult Swim. Some fans even spent that year convinced it was some kind of elaborate April Fools joke because it took so long to show up on screen.
Dan Harmon has said the whole concept behind Pickle Rick was directly inspired by the Breaking Bad episode 4 Days Out, where Walt and Jesse get stranded in the desert and have to survive using nothing but their wits and whatever junk is lying around. Swap the desert for a sewer full of rats and you've basically got Rick's version of the same survival story.
Pickle Rick didn't just become a fan favorite, it also won Rick and Morty its first ever Emmy, taking home Outstanding Animated Program at the 2018 Creative Arts Emmys. It beat out some genuinely stiff competition that year, including episodes of The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, and South Park.
The love for Pickle Rick got so big that Pringles announced a dedicated Pickle Rick flavored can, timed to launch right around Super Bowl weekend in early February 2020, giving the murderous gherkin a genuinely bizarre second life as a snack food.
Between October 2016 and July 2017, Adult Swim quietly slipped sixteen tiny stop-motion Claymation shorts into their ad breaks, each one putting Rick and Morty into parodies of famous film scenes rendered entirely in clay.
In 2016 Justin Roiland launched his own game studio and called it Squanchtendo, a mashup of the show's promiscuous alien Squanchy and Nintendo. He later renamed it Squanch Games at the end of 2017, and it went on to make the VR title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality and the sci-fi comedy game High on Life.
