Adult Swim Finally Asks Summer and Beth to Do a ‘Rick and Morty’ New Season Promo
Sorry, Rick Sanchez — this promo still does not pass the Bechdel Test.
Against all odds, the flagship Adult Swim series Rick and Morty will return for its seventh season on October 15th, overcoming two strikes and the dishonorable discharge of the show’s co-creator and biggest star, Justin Roiland. After Roiland was hit with domestic violence charges (which were later dropped) earlier this year, Adult Swim swiftly cut ties with the caustic comic, and a deluge of disparaging stories released in the aftermath of his fall from grace painted Roiland as a horrible co-worker at the very least and possibly even a creepy internet pervert who sends violently sexual DMs to underage girls.
Rick and Morty, however, has a much healthier relationship with women than the voice actor formerly known for Rick and Morty, and Adult Swim finally let its leading ladies tease the new season. Took them long enough.
The playfully un-preachy gender discourse in Rick and Morty revolves around in-jokes known to longtime fans of the series. Like most new shows that are animated, comedic, science fiction or some combination of the three, the first season of Rick and Morty was slightly dude-heavy, which, of course, is to be expected when both title characters are themselves dudes. When the show took off, showrunner Dan Harmon made a concerted effort to invite women into his formerly all-male writers’ room and flesh out the characters of Beth and Summer Smith outside of their relationships with the men in their lives.
Rick and Morty fans welcomed the fresh voices into the community with open arms, celebrating the opportunity to expand their — ha ha, sorry, just kidding, a bunch of them doxxed, harassed and scapegoated the show’s first female writers while declaring that Rick and Morty died the second Adult Swim let a woman write a script.
Undeterred, the Rick and Morty creative team continued to improve their characters and diversify storylines behind the strength of writers like Jane Becker, Erica Rosbe and Sarah Carbiener, even poking fun at the fan-created non-controversies regarding female creatives and characters on the show in episodes like Season Four’s “Never Ricking Morty,” which featured a hilariously meta scene in which Morty has to save Rick’s life by writing a scene between his mother and sister that passes the aforementioned Bechdel test.
Now, with Season Seven right around the corner, that same contingency of perpetually triggered male Rick and Morty fans are saying that the removal of Roiland and capitulation to woke feminist cancel culture has officially killed the show, even brigading a different Season Seven promo with claims that the new voice of Rick and Morty is completely unlistenable and unfit to fill Roiland’s shoes — even though the clip in question was a Roiland performance.
The Summer and Beth promo promises that this remarkably measured chiding at the most incensed and involuntarily celibate fringe of the Rick and Morty fandom will continue into Season Seven. I can’t wait to see how the Roiland-heads react when Summer and Beth finally talk about their special times and strong boobs.
