askchapo

I wouldn't even call the show "brainless" TBH. Family Guy is brainless. Rick and Morty is mostly low-brow humor, but it also has bits that leave me with something to ponder.

I'd put it (at least a few episodes of the show) at about the same level of profundity as Fight Club (1999) or Inception (2010), which are also good pieces of media that young people who are being exposed to existentialism for the first time tend to overrate. They also suffer from unfair backlash due to their overpopularity (tall poppy syndrome), which is the phenomenon we're seeing with Rick and Morty.

I think people call Rick and Morty "brainless" because they don't want to be perceived like the redditor who wrote the embarrassing "very high IQ" copypasta.

The copypasta author said that you need "a solid grasp of theoretical physics" to comprehend the show, which is ridiculous. As if you need a background in math to understand Rick's portal gun from a narrative perspective. It's a magical device that takes you to worlds where things are different. That's it.

The author also said "The humor is extremely subtle", which is not true. Some of the humor is clever (I enjoy the way that Dan Harmon subverts tropes) but almost none of it is subtle.

That's a totally fine way to consume it I suppose.

But R&M has been subject to probably more leftist critiques than any other media in the past 5ish years, most saying it sucks.