Posted in: Adult Swim, Preview, Rick and Morty, TV | Tagged: Adult Swim, dan harmon, Justin Roiland, preview, rick and morty

Rick and Morty Team Wouldn't Let Justin Roiland "Drag Down" Hard Work

Rick and Morty EP Steve Levy discusses the Emmy-nominated episode "Night Family" and the creative teams coming together post-Justin Roiland.

As we await word on when the seventh season of Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland's Rick and Morty will debut (and who will be replacing Roiland as our dimension-hopping duo) and a premiere date for Adult Swim's Rick and Morty: The Anime, let's not lose sight of the show's huge honor. Written by Rob Schrab and directed by Jacob Hair, the Season 6 episode "Night Family" has been nominated for an Emmy Award – representing the show in the category of Best Animated Series (alongside FOX's Bob's Burgers, Netflix's Entergalactic, Adult Swim's Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal, and FOX's The Simpsons). Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Executive Producer Steve Levy covered a number of aspects of the episode that made it work as well as it did with viewers and critics (and Emmy voters, clearly). In the following highlights, Levy explains why the writing was so important in offering a different family dynamic and how the writers & artists rise to the occasion time and again. In addition, Levy addresses how the creative teams reacted when the news of Roiland's departure first hit the headlines.

"Night Family" Offered a "Close" Family Dynamic: "The writing was great because not only is it very funny, it is also one of the few episodes that keeps the family really close. The emotional core is really there as it explores the deep-seated problems that the family members have with each other through the zombie-like, sleeping versions of themselves."

Levy Credits Creative Teams That "Really Work Well Together": "Another reason is because we have some of the most talented folks I have ever worked with. It can get really challenging at times because there are often so many rewrites, and we really want to push the art. We also had some character design changes late in the game, but the artists and writers really work well together."

Levy on How Creative Teams Pulled Together Post-Justin Roiland: "We had a rug pulled from underneath us. The only people we could lean on were each other. It would have been very easy to just say, 'I'm done, and I don't want to do anything with this show anymore.' But our crew said, 'No, we're not going to let one person drag down all of our hard work.' This show is created by this team — this family of incredibly hardworking people, and we are going to push through and show the world that we aren't going to miss a beat. The work that we're doing across the board has only gotten better. When the new season comes out, we'll focus on how amazing it all turned out. We hope the fans will realize that this is the same old show, maybe even better!"

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