One of the truly amazing feats within “Rixty Minutes” is seeing the artwork that these animators come up with based off of Roiland and Harmon’s improvised tangents (their work in the Turbulent Juice ad is particularly inspired). These are just real, campfire-esque conversations and the sort of chatter that you actually have with your friends while casually watching TV it’s a perfect reflection of that relaxed dynamic. There are even weird echoes of real life coursing through the episode’s conversational tone, like the tangent on Lorenzo Music and Bill Murray. The interdimensional aspect of this programming conceit is never backed down from. The commercials that the family sift through hit parodies of pop culture, explore rambling exercises in comedy, and relish in the bizarre, almost as if trying to make it a point to confuse the viewer. After all, isn’t that part of the fun of an improv experiment in the first place? You want to see the rough edges. Rather than the episode attempting professionalism by editing this material out, it instead celebrates it and relishes the moments when things go off the rails. There are so many instances where Roiland breaks down or just straight up laughs during whatever he is saying. Never before have chaotic rambles been more important.Ī lot of this episode’s success is due to coasting off of Justin Roiland’s fumbling energy and simply how much fun these guys are having with their nonsense. In the end it’s the repressive embrace of television that Morty pushes onto summer as a way of dealing with life. That’s a heavy message to impart, but one that’s completely in line with the show’s frequent nihilism. It plays hand-in-hand with the mammoth emotional impact that the episode goes out on, with this being a balanced mix of heaviness and silliness that makes the binaries of television and real-life very clear. All of the television ads and commercials are unscripted, as if to imply that television is full of freedom and limitless expectations, whereas Rick, Morty, and everyone else are tethered to reality’s script. We also allow for this episode to be structurally different because television is such a crucial element for the series, with improv being the perfect conduit to explore it in. The episode even “premiered” early in a weird Instagram experiment where the episode was posted online in 100 15-second clips. Again, there’s no real plot here other than Rick showing off his fancy interdimensional cable box, with a plethora of media from other realities being vegged on accordingly. The synthesis here is a rare thing where the show’s intelligence and creativity work in tandem with this “laziness” and abandonment of a script to produce something very special that shouldn’t work. This is by far the thinnest episode of the series up until this point, yet it also became many people’s favorite entry, and this is a show that thrives on its meticulous plotting. Impressively, there isn’t even really a plot to “Rixty Minutes,” but this is barely something that you notice due to the breakneck bombardment of comedy. However, this is a show about science and experiments after all, so to actually conduct one itself – curious to see the outcome – is a brilliant application of switching to an improvised structure. The idea of doing a largely improvised episode of an animated program is deeply ambitious (look no further than Home Movies’ problematic first season) and something that could completely fall apart. In a very short amount of time the series has been able to establish itself as one that breaks the rules and takes risks (much like Dan Harmon’s previous series, Community). Rick and Morty is a show that is constantly experimenting, whether it’s an episode that’s split into 64 separate quadrants or a fake clip show that’s also a heavy riff on The Thing. “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. ‘Structurally Sound’ is a recurring feature where each week a different structurally unusual, rule-breaking anomaly of an episode from a comedy series is examined.
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