Did This ‘Rick and Morty’ Season 8 Preview Just Reveal the Return of ‘Interdimensional Cable’?

Adult Swim’s latest promo for the upcoming Rick and Morty Season Eight just teased that the series is finally turning “Interdimensional Cable” into a trilogy, but we really want the show to give us eight specials, one for each Jan-Michael Vincent.

Back in the first season of Rick and Morty, the writing staff’s loose, explorative approach to building out the multiversal world of the series led to the creation of an episode that would come to define the show’s tone and sense of humor for the next decade with “Rixty Minutes.” This soon-to-be fan-favorite episode introduced Rick’s most entertaining invention: the Interdimensional Cable Box, which allows the Sanchez-Smith family to watch every show from every channel of television in any universe, allowing them and us to watch brief snippets of improvisational chaos with endless comedic possibilities.

While the Interdimensional Cable Box has been a staple of the Smith home’s living room ever since Rick hooked it up to the TV, Rick and Morty hasn’t done a full episode devoted to the invention since the Season Two classic “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate,” that may change come May 25th when Season Eight premieres. In the recently released Rick and Morty Season Eight promotional video that showed off the upcoming episode titles and brief sketches of scenes from each installment, the preview of the episode “Ricker than Fiction” featured a bizarre scene of a Christmas-tree-looking robot killing someone named Baron Thistle in broad daylight before the frame zooms out to show the welcome sight of Rick and Morty sitting on the couch and watching the madness unfold. 

Hopefully, the “Ricker than Fiction” scene choice for the episode title reveal video isn’t the only part of the episode that features Interdimensional Cable, otherwise the editor in charge of putting this promo together took the word “teaser” a little too seriously. Still, based on the title itself, Interdimensional Cable fans have ample reason to get excited for a long-awaited third installment.

Originally, Rick and Morty moved away from regular “Interdimensional Cable” episodes because the writers wanted to explore other kinds of anthology episodes — such as the Season Three hit “Morty's Mind Blowers” — without derailing the season with frequent specials. Of course, while nobody from Rick and Morty would admit it at the time, there was also the issue of former series star and disgraced co-creator Justin Roiland’s increasing dissatisfaction with and detachment from the show around Season Three, which would have made recording another Interdimensional Cable more difficult.

In order to create the first two “Interdimensional Cable” episodes, the movers and shakers of Rick and Morty essentially just sent Roiland into the recording booth with a couple other creatives and a bunch of booze and let them bounce half-pitches off of each other into the microphones. This is why “Interdimensional Cable” had the “improvisational tone” that Morty acknowledged; it was, in a sense, endless improv from the show’s star.

Seeing as Roiland was recording his voice lines from home and refused to even go to into the office by the end of his Rick and Morty tenure, making a third “Interdimensional Cable” episode was logistically impossible — until now. We’ll see if Adult Swim let new Rick and Morty voice stars Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden stretch their improv legs when “Ricker than Fiction” airs.