‘We’re Not Going To Let One Person Drag Down All of Our Hard Work’: ‘Rick and Morty’ Producer Side-Eyes Justin Roiland Ahead of Season Seven
In the language of the Producer People, “Wubba lubba dub-dub” means, “Thanks for nearly tanking the show, Justin.”
Rick and Morty Season Seven is supposedly slated to premiere before the end of the year, no small feat for a show that’s seen the same two strikes as the rest of Hollywood as well as the unceremonious and much-publicized exit of its biggest star. Back in January, news broke that Justin Roiland, co-creator of Rick and Morty and voice actor of Rick and Morty, faced domestic violence charges stemming from an alleged incident almost three years prior. Though the charges would be dismissed months later due to the prosecutor’s assessment that a conviction could not be reached with the evidence available, the scandal opened the floodgates for unrelated stories of Roiland’s alleged bad behavior both behind the scenes of his various projects and in his horribly uncomfortable online interactions with underaged fans.
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The producers of Rick and Morty quickly cut ties with Roiland, and the deterioration of his relationship with Dan Harmon and others at the Adult Swim series painted the flood of allegations as the final straw after years of transgressions. Before the start of the SAG strike, executive producer Steve Levy claimed that they were nearly finished finding a perfect soundalike to take over Roiland’s voice roles, and, in a recent interview with Los Angeles Times, Levy explained how well his team responded to having “a rug pulled from underneath us.”
“The only people we could lean on were each other,” Levy said of the immediate aftermath of Roiland’s controversy that left the show with a glaring hole in the cast list. “It would have been very easy to just say, ‘I’m done and I don’t want to do anything with this show anymore.’ But our crew said, ‘No, we’re not going to let one person drag down all of our hard work.’”
If the early reports of Roiland’s behavior behind the scenes of Rick and Morty are to be believed, then, in many ways, the caustic co-creator who hasn’t served as a writer on the series since its third season had been dragging down the rest of the crew for quite some time. “This show is created by this team — this family of incredibly hardworking people, and we are going to push through and show the world that we aren’t going to miss a beat,” Levy explained.
“The work that we’re doing across the board has only gotten better,” Levy continued. “When the new season comes out, we’ll focus on how amazing it all turned out. We hope the fans will realize that this is the same old show, maybe even better!”
Considering fans hopefully won’t have to imagine the new voice of Rick and Morty asking a teenager, “Why are you such jailbait?” in Season Seven, we’d say the new version of the show is already a massive improvement.
