Rick and Morty Season 9 Takes Big Swings — Here’s What’s Working and What’s Dividing Fans

The Sci-Fi Machine Keeps Running

Four episodes into its ninth season, Rick and Morty is doing something that long-running animated shows rarely attempt: it’s genuinely changing. Not in the cosmetic, “new voice actor, same jokes” way that defined the post-Justin Roiland transition. This season, the show is taking structural and emotional risks that have split the critical consensus right down the middle — and that’s exactly what makes it worth watching.

Adult Swim sent all ten episodes to critics ahead of the May 24 premiere, which means we already know where this season is headed even as weekly viewers are only at the halfway mark. The verdict? Season 9 is a season of two minds — one that wants to be the funniest sci-fi comedy on television, and another that wants to be the most introspective character study Adult Swim has ever produced. Whether those two ambitions coexist successfully depends on which critic you ask.

What the Critics Are Saying

Collider’s review was the harshest, arguing that the season’s “major story change doesn’t work,” criticizing the pivot toward a serialized exploration of Rick’s mental health at the expense of the standalone sci-fi adventures that made the show a cultural phenomenon. Their reviewer noted that “every single episode somehow finds its way back to a self-reflexive exploration of Rick’s character,” suggesting the season loses the anarchic spirit that defined earlier runs.

ScreenRant saw it differently, praising the “incredible innovation, ingenuity, and creativity” across all ten episodes and highlighting how the Smith family — particularly Morty, Summer, Beth, and Jerry — are more central to the narrative than ever before. IGN landed somewhere in the middle, calling the season “fresh and raucously entertaining” while acknowledging not every episode is a winner. The consensus seems to be: if you’re watching Rick and Morty for the madcap standalone adventures, this season might frustrate you. If you’ve been waiting for the show to take its characters seriously, this is your moment.

The Character Work Nobody Expected

Here’s what’s actually happening in Season 9. Rick Sanchez is being deconstructed — not through explosive revelations about his past (we’ve had plenty of those), but through the quieter accumulation of moments that ask: what does it actually cost to be the smartest person in every room? The self-reflexive quality that Collider criticized is, depending on your perspective, either the season’s fatal flaw or its greatest strength.

The fourth episode, “A Ricker Runs Through It,” which just aired on June 14, is a perfect example. It riffs on Robert Redford’s 1992 drama A River Runs Through It, sending Rick and Morty on a fishing trip with a mysterious bearded character. The title cards suggest something light, but what unfolds is a meditation on Rick’s inability to simply exist in a moment without turning it into a problem to be solved. This isn’t the Rick who turns himself into a pickle to avoid family therapy. This is a Rick who’s genuinely tired.

Morty, meanwhile, is carrying more narrative weight than ever. There’s a simmering sadness beneath his exasperation this season — a sense that he’s outgrown his grandfather’s chaos but doesn’t know how to leave. For a show that built its reputation on nihilistic one-liners and universe-destroying punchlines, this is surprisingly tender territory. It puts Rick and Morty in conversation with something like BoJack Horseman, the gold standard for animated shows that turned existential despair into appointment television. BoJack proved you could be funny and devastating in the same breath; Season 9 of Rick and Morty is testing whether its own audience will accept that bargain.

The Sci-Fi Comedy Lineage

Rick and Morty didn’t invent the sci-fi animated comedy — Futurama was doing planet-hopping workplace comedy with genuine pathos back in 1999, and its Hulu revival proves the formula still works. But Rick and Morty did something Futurama never attempted: it made the central relationship between a genius and his grandson the emotional engine of the entire show.

Season 9 doubles down on that relationship in ways that reveal how much the show has matured since 2013. The interdimensional cable episodes are gone. The self-contained movie parodies are fewer. In their place is something that resembles a genuine arc — not a mythology-heavy one like the Evil Morty saga, but a character-driven arc about a man who has seen everything and a boy who is starting to see through him.

If you need a palate cleanser between episodes, Solar Opposites on Hulu continues to deliver the kind of chaotic alien-comedy energy that defined early Rick and Morty. And South Park, still the reigning champion of satirical animation after nearly three decades, offers a reminder that adult animation can evolve its social commentary without sacrificing its identity. Rick and Morty Season 9 is attempting something harder: evolving its emotional core without losing the comedic voice that made people care in the first place.

The Release Schedule and What’s Still Coming

Season 9 runs ten episodes, airing Sundays at 11 p.m. ET/PT on Adult Swim with next-day streaming on HBO Max and Hulu. Here’s where we stand:

• Episode 1: “There’s Something About Morty” — May 24
• Episode 2: “Ricks Days, Seven Nights” — May 31
• Episode 3: “Rick Fu Hustle” — June 7
• Episode 4: “A Ricker Runs Through It” — June 14 (just aired)
• Episode 5: “Jer Bud” — June 21
• Episode 6: “Erickerhead” — June 28
• Episode 7: “Mortgully: The Last Rickforest” — July 5
• Episode 8: “Rickuiem Mort a Dream” — July 12
• Episode 9: “Salute Your Morts” — July 19
• Episode 10: “Field of Dreams” — July 26

The episode titles alone suggest a season that’s in constant conversation with pop culture — from kung fu movies (“Rick Fu Hustle”) to baseball fantasy (“Field of Dreams”) to what sounds like a FernGully riff (“Mortgully: The Last Rickforest”). But the titles are misdirection. What’s actually happening underneath is a show grappling with its own legacy at a moment when adult animation is more competitive than ever.

And Yes, There’s a Movie Coming

Dan Harmon confirmed in a recent interview that a Rick and Morty movie is in development — a revelation that landed somewhere between “obviously” and “finally.” The show has been doing feature-length ambition in 22-minute packages for years; the idea of giving it a theatrical canvas is both thrilling and slightly terrifying. The “Vat of Acid” episode and “The Ricklantis Mixup” proved the show can deliver cinematic storytelling in a sitcom container. Whether that translates to 90 uninterrupted minutes — and whether the Season 9 approach to character work is a preview of the movie’s tone — is one of the most interesting questions in animation right now.

The Bottom Line

Rick and Morty Season 9 isn’t going to please everyone. The show that once made its name on “nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die” is now making room for genuine emotional stakes — and that’s always going to alienate viewers who showed up for the nihilism. But nine seasons in, the alternative is creative stagnation, and there’s plenty of adult animation out there content to repeat itself forever. Rick and Morty is choosing the harder path. Whether it sticks the landing remains to be seen, but watching it try is better than watching it phone it in.