The unsexy reason Rick and Morty season three is taking so long

Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon addressed why the third season of the show was taking so long back in January, but the recent rumors of fights with co-creator Justin Roiland caused him to discuss the long-awaited season again in what can accurately be described as a nice rant.

There’s no single reason for the delay, but Harmon’s remarks do a good job of showing how hard it can be to follow up two seasons of very, very good television.

“A hungover thread where I address Rick and Morty devotees because I feel bad for any fan worrying about any show-threatening issue: Justin and I are very regretful about the season taking way too long,” Harmon wrote in a series of tweets. “I want to explain ‘what happened’ because it's way less dramatic than you might ever imagine.”

The issue really came down to fear.

More of his thoughts are collected below, with minor grammatical edits from the tweets:

It's a common yet odd phenomenon. Tail-chasing, perfectionism, overthinking? One problem is that any description you pick for it is going to have a falseness. If I say "we overthought" someone else could say "well, no, we thought the right amount," it's like talking about religion or something. It feels I think, to writers, sacrilegious and ineffective to open the creative process and poke and label.

He goes on to say that fighting might have been a good thing, but it’s not the cause of the delay, and they wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret due to, you know, tweets and stuff.

The rest of the thread is just as interesting, and Harmon addresses his fears about fans seeing the “clickbait” pieces about fights and existential threats to the show, but it all seems to boil down to the fact the third season took too long to write, and that’s it.

It’s not very sexy, but it makes a lot of sense.