Rick and Morty boss Dan Harmon has teased that the show is “more on schedule than we’ve ever been” ahead of season five.
Work is currently underway on the next batch of episodes of the animated show, and the co-creator has admitted that the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to “focus” production.
“We’re more on schedule than we’ve ever been,” he said at PaleyFest NY 2020 (via Syfy Wire). “It kind of makes you have to focus on the whole process when you don’t have this office environment anymore. Everyone has to run this bee colony remotely, so the honey just gets made more consistently. It’s working for us.”
Harmon went on to tease some of the storylines in season five, revealing: “There’s an episode in season five where Morty has a relationship with another female character that’s not Jessica.
“It’s just a great little story and my very, very longtime friend and collaborator Rob Schrab wrote it … He’s also a very tender writer; a juvenile, John Hughes, he really feels heartache on a level a man his age shouldn’t. There’s an episode coming up in season five, my Emmy is going to that one.”
The co-creator also admitted during the panel that he sometimes gets confused between seasons five and six.
“Immediately after this panel, I’ll be going and reviewing an animatic for a late season five episode,” he continued. “And yet, we are very late [in the process of] writing season six. I’m looking at finales for both seasons and then also refining the finale of one and then the premiere of the other. So I can’t remember the differences.”
Meanwhile, last month Harmon weighed-into casting controversies that have recently arisen among animated shows, with characters of colour being voiced by white actors.
“That issue, they call it whitewashing if you will, that’s been going on for a while,” he said.
“The wave has gotten to the point where it’s huge now, but we’ve been in that water for a bit. And I’ve – not even out of nobility, but out of pragmatism – I’ve always been of the mind that there’s a lot of actors out there; if we’re saying that it’s important part of a character they are of a certain background, the best way to do this is to find an actor of that background.”
Harmon added: “But it gets into this weird question, ‘What if you didn’t find an actor from that particular group for representation purposes?’ or ‘What if that actor is the worst actor in the world?’ Those conversations are minefields.”
