The best thing on TV ever: Rick and Morty, Season 5, reviewed

I’ve been trying to avoid the house TV room as much as possible recently because it tends to be occupied by family members watching Wimbledon and the Euros. My adamantine principles prevent me looking at either: I won’t watch Wimbledon because of the masks and socially distanced interviews and I refuse to watch any sport where the players all kneel before the match in homage to race-baiting Marxist separatists.

So it came as a huge relief when Boy, finally home from uni, switched over to Rick and Morty. My immediate response was: ‘What is this noisy, in-your-face, in-joke young person’s crap you are inflicting on me, hateful progeny of mine.’ But within moments this had given way to ecstatic joy as I realised that this cartoon series, which I’ve been overlooking since its debut in 2013, is quite possibly the best thing on TV ever.

Rick and Morty has been described by its co-creator Dan Harmon (also responsible for the similarly weird and brilliant US sitcom Community) as like a ‘cross between The Simpsons and Futurama’; and by critics as ‘a never-ending fart joke wrapped around a studied look into nihilism’ and ‘an artful answer to the question of what follows postmodernism: a decadent regurgitation of all its tropes, all at once, leavened by some humanistic wistfulness’. These descriptions capture quite well its mix of extreme puerility and extraordinary sophistication: it’s sweary, crass and low, yet the plotting is so dense, complex, multilayered and referential it feels as though it can only have been put together by a writers’ room of a dozen autistic geniuses.

It began life as a short animated spoof of Back to the Future, which explains the two main characters — Rick is the foul-mouthed, distracted, wild-haired professor; his grandson Morty (i.e.