Rick and Morty: Dan Harmon Believes "Canon Sucks," Knows Fans Love It

Posted in: Adult Swim, TV | Tagged: rick and morty

Rick and Morty: Dan Harmon Believes "Canon Sucks," Knows Fans Love It

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon isn't a fan of canon, though he knows fans are; he is a fan of the series doing visual storytelling.

Published Sun, 03 May 2026 09:37:08 -0500
by Ray Flook
|
Comments

Article Summary

• Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon says canon “sucks,” even as he admits fans love the show’s mythology.
• Harmon says Rick and Morty Season 8 finale “Hot Rick” let the team tell a story outside heavy canon demands.
• As Rick and Morty nears Season 9, Harmon says the series now leans more on visual storytelling than rigid scripts.
• Harmon credits Rick and Morty artists and fan-driven writers for balancing canon, speedier production, and bigger payoffs.

With three weeks to go until Adult Swim's Rick and Morty returns for its ninth season, series co-creator and executive producer Dan Harmon wants to make something clear. He's not a fan of canon. He gets it. He understands that fans are all about it. But as he sees it, canon "sucks." He also appreciates how the Emmy Award-winning animated series has been able to involve the show's artists more in the storytelling process, now that it's inchign closer to double-digit seasons. First reported by Cartoon Brew, Harmon took part in an Adult Swim FYC panel at the Television Academy, alongside Genndy Tartakovsky (Primal) and Joe Cappa (Haha, You Clowns), to offer insights into the episodes that are up for Emmy Award consideration.

During the conversation, Harmon addressed how the long-running animated series's ever-growing canon can be a bit of an obstacle to the creative team. "Canon sucks, it drags your show down, but it's also what you guys love, so when you can do it without fucking up the show, it's a great thing," he shared. From there, Harmon explained how S08E10: "Hot Rick" allowed them to work outside of the constraints of the show's overarching mythology.

Another impact that the show's canon has had on the show is in the storytelling relationship between the writers and artists. While Rick and Morty was very script-focused during its earlier seasons, its longevity has allowed the animated series to introduce more visual storytelling into the season. "There's a culture in animation where there's a supposed dichotomy of script-driven versus board-driven. And to slowly move to a beautiful hybrid, which is what it always has been and should have been, where you realize anyone that imposed that dichotomy was the enemy, for me anyway, could only happen through time and trust," said Harmon.

He continued, "It's become a normal thing, for even junior writers on 'Rick and Morty,' they're coming into a school of thought where they're encouraged as writers to not waste their time trying to Isaac Asimov-describe a gunfight and instead actually do what feels like hackery and cheating to a writer, which is to say, 'Artists go crazy here.'" In addition, the shift also helps to speed up the overall production process. "We found the more we did that, the less we had to re-break stories. Because it turns out, I guess people who draw stuff for a living know how to make stories happen," Harmon noted.

"The great thing about 'Rick and Morty' is that a lot of our staff are former 'Rick and Morty' writer's assistants—that whole tradition goes back to Mike McMahan before he abandoned us for his 'Star Trek' show ['Lower Decks']; he was the original first 'Rick and Morty' writer's assistant who left us at the EP level, executive producer. We've continued that tradition, and that makes these people not only workhorses but they are huge 'Rick and Morty' fans from the get-go," Harmon shared with Gizmodo back in 2023, about how the new writers keep the canon alive.

Harmon continued, "I'm so grateful to have people on the show that are like, 'Look, I'm on this show because I love this show, and I've loved it since the beginning—and have you noticed that we haven't given any red meat to the avid fans?' We'll be working on multiple seasons at once, so I won't notice. I'll just be like, 'Oh, have we not done Evil Morty in a while?' I have this general allergy to canonical stuff because I feel like it'll happen anyway, and therefore leaning into it is like leaning into gravity and falling down when your job is to jump and soar. But yeah, I was asleep at the wheel. [It was] our passionate writers that were like, 'No, it's time to resurface this.' And the fun thing is that the timing of it works out so that it's going to be smack in the middle of this season."

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!