When Will ‘Rick and Morty’ Season 4 Premiere?

With Rick and Morty‘s third season finale upon us, it’s only natural for fans to wonder, “what’s next?”

Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly when Season Four will premiere on Adult Swim, but there are some positive trends we can look toward and deduce a possibility.

Series co-creator Dan Harmon said he’s trying to hone the process, and that his own perfectionism is what delayed the third season. After taking a year off between the first two seasons, then two years between this one and the last one, it’s hard to keep the faith.

But Adult Swim is sitting on a cashcow, and despite rumors to the contrary they are not going to cancel one of their most successful shows ever.

The pressure is on Harmon to deliver and he’s no stranger to the situation. He was brutally honest about his time running Community for NBC in a conversation with EW, and how he buckled right around this time during that show.

“I never got this far [working on NBC’s] Community,” said Harmon. “I fell apart in season 3 of Community and got fired in season 4. Now I’m about to do season 4 of Rick and Morty and want to prove that I’ve grown.”

If they can keep up with the momentum, we might get new episodes in the summer of 2018. And yet, with their track record, fans have reason to doubt that is possible.

Season Four Is Already In Progress

Given the length of time between Seasons One and Two, and how that duration doubled between Seasons Two and Three, it’s not irrational to worry that we’re a long ways away from seeing new episodes.

But based on recent comments from Harmon, maybe we don’t have much to worry about.

Though Season Three was supposed to be the longest season ever with 14 episodes, the show is ending after tonight’s tenth episode. But there might be a silver lining to the truncated season, as the writers room has a lot of ideas they can put into new episodes based on changes they made this year.

Harmon has an example:

“The second episode of season 3 — that’s them going to a Mad Max style adventure in a post-apocalyptic wasteland — believe it or not, that story started with the idea of Rick having a ‘Book-A-Lyzer’ which is a device where you can go into any book,” said Harmon. “They were going to find a book by Jerry that he wrote when he was younger and they end up trapped in his crappy novel. That episode changed so much that we can still do that episode.

“If an episode grows from one [idea] into an entirely different [idea] that’s still no better than the first, maybe we’re writing wrong. But we don’t back off on stuff so much as we say ‘maybe later’ and move on. We have a pretty hefty shoebox from season 3 of ideas that are ready to go. Some are fully written, in fact.”