Rick and Morty – Season 6: When Will It Resume?

Rick and Morty Season 6 is set to resume on November 20, 2022 with more episodes.

By Rick Gonzales | Updated

To say that Cartoon Network’s Rick and Morty is a success would be an understatement. The series, which began back in late 2013, has now entered its sixth season (and is still on hiatus) and has plenty more in the tank. Let’s find out just how much more Rick and Morty we are going to see and also find out when season 6 will start up again.

RICK AND MORTY SEASON 6 PREMIERED ON SEPTEMBER 4th AND WILL RESUME ON NOVEMBER 20, 2022

rick and morty season 6

In what turned out to be the shortest time in between seasons, Rick and Morty Season 6 kicked off on September 4, 2022, and ran a new episode once a week for six straight weeks. As with each prior season, there is no rhyme or reason for how the season is laid out. The stories are not told in a linear fashion, so the storylines have a tendency to jump around.

So far, we have seen in season 6 of Rick and Morty, Rick, while trying to reset his portal gun, accidentally sends the interdimensional travelers back to their original dimensions. We have also seen Morty find himself in a Die Hard-type situation when alien terrorists attack the Blips and Chitz arcade, forcing Morty into action. In another episode, Space Beth returns, bonding with regular Beth over Thanksgiving.

Season 6 has also, so far, given us the “somnambulator,” an alien device that Rick latches onto which allows him to sleepwalk voluntarily so he can perform random tasks at night, so he won’t have to do them during daytime hours. Another episode has Jerry getting a fortune cookie stating he is destined to have sex with his mother (yikes). He and Rick then bust into the fortune cookie factory to see what gives.

Finally, in the last episode before going on hiatus, an enlightened species of dinosaurs arrive on Earth with all of their technical advancements, claiming Earth is their former home. This last episode was seen on October 9, 2022. Season 6 looks to resume on November 20, 2022.

Along with the usual fun Rick and Morty have had so far in Season 6, they have also brought in a nice guest voice crew. Kari Wahlgren has been in an episode as the AI robot D.I.A.N.E., and Peter Dinklage has also made a vocal appearance. Season 6 has also heard Keith David, Lisa Kudrow, and Jason Mraz in vocal roles.

RICK AND MORTY’S SEASON 6 SCORED 95% ON ROTTEN TOMATOES

rick and morty season 6

Rick and Morty might only be six episodes into its 10-episode sixth season, but the critical response is right back where it started. The first four seasons of the series saw critical response on Rotten Tomatoes with nothing less than a 91% favorable rating (Season 1: 96%, Season 2: 91%, Season 3: 96%, Season 4: 96%). For season 5, though, critics and fans alike were not as pleased.

Season 5 was called uneven by many, even though it did still receive an 86% favorable critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It didn’t strike the funny bone as often as the first four seasons but tended to lean more into the crude side of the series. Nothing wrong with crude if it is well-balanced crude, and apparently there were a few too many misfires.

Rick and Morty creators, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon have righted the ship in Season 6. It has a much better balance and critics and fans are fully back in its corner. The six episodes sit with a 95% favorable critic response. Of course, there are still four more episodes to go that could alter that response and thankfully we won’t have to wait much longer, as Season 6’s episode 7 will air on November 20, 2022.

RICK AND MORTY WAS LAUNCHED IN 2013

rick and morty season 6

Rick and Morty are the brainchildren of Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. The duo met at the Los Angeles non-profit monthly short film festival, Channel 101, which Harmon co-founded. Roiland began to submit his own material to the film festival a year after Channel 101 launched and while audiences were confused by Roiland’s “sick and twisted” humor, Harmon got it and the two struck up a friendship.

After Roiland lost his job in 2006, he and Harmon began to combine efforts and creative energy into webisodes for Channel 101. The end result was called The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, which was an animated short featuring parodies of Marty McFly and Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films. The short film, which earned a wild audience reaction when it played, basically told the story of Doc Smith, who convinces Mharti that the answer to all his troubles is to perform oral sex on him.

As time went on, Adult Swim was looking for more content to fill their time slots and reached out to Harmon to see if he had any ideas for animated shows. Harmon quickly called Roiland, who brought up using the Doc Smith and Mharti characters, which he since renamed Rick and Morty. They were on to something.

Initially, Roiland only wanted to produce one 11-minute segment for each episode, but Adult Swim balked at that idea, wanting and needing longer episodes and a bigger commitment. The way to do this, according to Harmon, was to build a family around the two established characters, Rick and Morty. So, Jerry, Beth, and Summer Smith were born to go along with Morty Smith and Rick Sanchez.

Roiland has been voicing both Rick and Morty since its inception and looks to continue for the remainder of the series. He has been joined by Chris Parnell (Saturday Night Live) as Jerry Smith, Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) as Beth Smith, and Spencer Grammer as Summer Smith.

THERE ARE 40 MORE EPISODES OF RICK AND MORTY AFTER SEASON 6

The first season of Rick and Morty consisted of 11 episodes. Each season after that was 10 episodes long, which was easier said than done. In fact, as Season 3 was nearing its end run, contract negotiations were ongoing between Cartoon Network and Harmon and Roiland which Harmon commented on, saying that contract negotiations had “gotten complicated this time around.”

Complicated or not, things eventually got worked out between all parties. When we say they got worked out, we mean to the tune of 70 new episodes. Long-term deals of that magnitude are virtually unheard of.

Those 70 episodes consisted of 10 for season 4, 10 for season 5, and 10 for season 6, of which six have already been shown. This means Rick and Morty have 40 more episodes, which is four more years. Both Harmon and Roiland celebrated this news in their own, irreverent way – in the shower – in which Harmon captioned, “Nothing this big has ever been seen in my shower.”

This 70-episode bump will also benefit fans of the show because with the knowledge that there is plenty more to come, Harmon and Roiland will be able to crank out the Rick and Morty seasons much faster. In the past, there has typically been a nearly two-year window between seasons. This changed when the creators hit season 6, as it came one day short of a year after the last episode of season 5 aired.

The plan now is to have each season have about a year in between the end of one and the start of a new season. Hopefully, they can keep up that pace. Harmon and Roiland seem ready to make it happen.

RICK AND MORTY HAS BEEN VIEWED MORE THAN 10 BILLION TIMES

70 episodes is a hefty investment by Cartoon network, but the numbers and awards say that the investment is a smart one. Twice Rick and Morty have taken home a Primetime Emmy Award (in 2018 and in 2020). They were nominated for their third Emmy Award in 2022 but did not win that one.

The numbers, though, are even more impressive. Rick and Morty has been the top animated comedy across all of US cable television in 2017, 2019, and 2021. According to Adult Swim, over its entire lifetime, Rick and Morty has been viewed over 10 billion times globally. This includes linear, digital, and streaming services.