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‘Rick And Morty’ Season 3 Delayed By Writers’ Conflicts

By Monika Zoltany
Published on: 11:56 PST, Jan 30, 2017

“When is Rick and Morty Season 3 coming out?” is the question on every Rick and Morty fan’s mind. Unfortunately, new information suggests that the best answer to that question is, “A long way off.”

Film and television industry website IndieWire caught up with Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon at the Sundance Film Festival. Harmon apologized for the delay and admitted that there was no Season 3 release date in sight.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t have a release date for Season 3. It’s not that I know it and I’m not allowed to say it; it’s [Adult Swim’s] domain. What I will tell you is it’s late because of us, it’s late because of me.”

This dashed the hopes of fans who thought that any late-January announcement about Rick and Morty would only confirm a Season 3 release date for March.

Instead, it looks like Season 3 of Rick and Morty is nowhere near complete.

Dan Harmon created Rick and Morty with writer Justin Roiland, who voices the titular characters. Roiland was not present at the interview, but Harmon explained that neither of them had a real explanation for the Season 3 delay.

“If Justin were here he’d agree. He and I would go, ‘Yeah, we f****d up,’ and it’s hard to put your finger on how we f****d up. ‘Rick and Morty’ keeps taking longer and longer to write, and I don’t know why.”

Harmon also explained that the writers were fighting more and that creative differences came into play.

“We have fights all the time and then we have fights about why we’re having fights. Well, we didn’t fight during Season 2, that’s why it’s taking longer! All this fighting! So OK, let’s stop fighting!”

The information is disheartening to fans whose last new Rick and Morty episode was seen in October 2015. The premiere of Season 3 was originally scheduled for late 2016, but when that didn’t happen, fans speculated that a January announcement would preclude a March or early summer release date for Season 3. Now, it looks like there is no telling when Rick and Morty Season 3 will be finished.

Worse, Harmon’s quotes suggest that production is deeply behind. His quotes suggest that Rick and Morty Season 3 has not even been written yet, which is bad news for any television show. For Rick and Morty, that means that few episodes if any have been animated. Animation can take months.

Rick and Morty receives excellent reviews from both critics and fans but took heat towards the end of its second season when some media outlets including Polygon and The Mary Sue called out the show for not having any female writers on staff. Buzzfeed interviewed former Adult Swim employees and published a particularly scathing critique of the network’s programming.

The “craving for a gender balance in the writers’ room” was remedied by Season 3 with the addition of Sarah Carbiener and Erica Rosbe to the team. The writers told the Chicks Who Script podcast on September 28, 2016 that they were done writing Rick and Morty Season 3 and that the next step was to screen the episodes when they came back from the Canadian studio where they are animated. But when Adult Swim failed to release even a finished trailer by late last year, fans feared that Mr. Poopybutthole’s prediction of a long wait before the Season 3 premiere was destined to come true.

Dan Harmon’s confession now proves that Mr. Poopybutthole was right. In addition to the strife, Rick and Morty Season 3 is supposed to contain 14 episodes instead of the usual 10. Hope that this the increased workload was the primary cause of the delay has proven to be overly optimistic, and only time will tell when Rick and Morty Season 3 gets released.

[Featured Image by TGPRN TURNER BROADCASTING SYSTEM, INC./AP Images]

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