Dan Harmon is ready to talk about all of it (including the Justin Roiland drama)

What happened next still rattles Harmon, which is one of the reasons he’s never publicly addressed it until now. When the show scored its second season, Harmon was eager to staff up, filling out their ragtag cable team with Harvard-educated Community writers. If they were going to make a play for network primetime audiences, he reasoned, they’d need network primetime writers. “If I had felt like I was imposing something, I would have never done it,” he says, having played the whole thing back in his head countless times over the past decade. He can see now how Roiland must have felt that that transition was about making the show more Harmon’s than his, but he insists that was not his intent.

“If anything, what I wanted was for Justin and I both to be able to be increasingly lazy and not show up for work. That was the dream,” says Harmon. “We’d be these rich idea men. He could roll around and go, like, ‘What if a genie had a butt instead of a dick?’ And I could be like, ‘Yeah, and plus, we’re going to make people cry about it, and that’s going to make them freak out. It’s a story about a genie butt dick, but then we’d win an Emmy, and it’d be more ironic than ever.’ And then I’d come to find out later that it was like, ‘Oh, Harmon brought in his Harmon writers,’ and, man, that is not how I saw it.”

Roiland started to pull back during season two. By then, the room was working considerably longer hours, as Harmon obsessed over the show’s quality, and the environment was no longer as much fun. After the season wrapped, Roiland sat down with Harmon and acknowledged just how miserable he’d become working at the show. The implication, according to Harmon, was that it was his fault. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure what he was saying,” recalls Harmon, “other than, maybe, ‘I feel like I’m in your shadow and I wish I wasn’t.’ ”

Mike Lazzo, who was running Adult Swim out of Atlanta at the time, was aware of the growing tensions insomuch as he’d see signs when he came to visit. “Dan would be in the writers room and Justin would be running radio control cars around the studio,” says Lazzo, who gives Harmon the lion’s share of the credit for Rick and Morty’s success: “It’s so dependent on writing and character, and those are Dan’s strengths. I remember I’d get frustrated waiting on his scripts, but then they’d arrive and they would be masterpieces.”

At some point in season three, Roiland simply stopped showing up. A mediator was ultimately brought in, but the exercise went nowhere. “I always felt like Justin wanted everybody to make him feel more comfortable, and I was just like, ‘Everybody wants to make you comfortable, communicate, tell us how to do that,’ ” says Harmon, who acknowledges: “I was freaking out about the whole thing because I wanted the partnership to function. I wanted him happy because when he’s happy, we have a hit on our hands.”

As drama waged behind the scenes, the show’s ratings continued to soar. Rick and Morty had quickly become the most viewed comedy among millennials in all of television. It was easily the most watched series in Adult Swim’s history. After season three, the two even managed to put their differences aside long enough to secure an additional 70 episodes, which was more than double the amount that had already aired. “It was like Justin and I were in love again, because we were dealing with the powers that be and talking about how rich we might be if we negotiated together,” says Harmon. But the moment was short-lived.

The last time he and Roiland spoke was over text in 2019, a conversation that left Harmon in tears. “He said things that he’d never said before about being unhappy, and I remember saying to him the last time we spoke in person, like, ‘I am worried about you, and I don’t know what to do about that except to give you all the string and also just say I’m scared that you’re not going to come back.’ But then this conversation became unprecedentedly confrontational.” Harmon stops himself there. “I think that’s as far as I get to take the story. At that point, we’re no longer both there for it, and it starts to become not only unfair for me to continue but totally uncomfortable because, from there, a friendship goes away, and I still don’t fully understand why.”

A few paragraphs unrelated to the roiland situation.

On Jan. 12, NBC News reported that Roiland had been charged with felony domestic violence in connection with a 2020 incident, which sent everyone involved with the show, many of whom have never actually met Roiland, into a tailspin. Roiland was later cleared of the charges due to insufficient evidence, but Adult Swim had already severed ties with him. When Rick and Morty returns for its seventh season Oct. 15, it will do so without Roiland’s voice. They’ve hired two young, unknown voice actors for the roles of Rick and Morty, a process that Harmon says he largely avoided, mostly out of denial. “It’s all just sad because the goal is for it to be indistinguishable,” he says, “at the same time, it would be absurd to suddenly decide that the entire foundation of your creative project was, oh, coincidentally, unimportant.”

But a few days after my time with Harmon, the same outlet published a new report featuring nine separate accounts of Roiland’s alleged misconduct, which range from sexual harassment to sexual assault. To lure these women, Roiland, who has denied the allegations, reportedly leveraged his affiliation with the show and its success on social media apps and on dating apps. When Harmon and I connect again, more than a week later, he’s read the piece and he can no longer stay quiet.

“The easiest thing for me to say about Justin has been nothing. Easy because he isolated so well and easy because I’m nobody’s first choice as a judge of anything or anyone. This is where I’d love to change the subject to myself, to what a piece of crap I’ve been my whole public life,” he says. “I would feel so safe and comfortable making this about me, but that trick is worthless here and dangerous to others. It’s other people’s safety and comfort that got damaged while I obsessed over a cartoon’s quality. Trust has now been violated between countless people and a show designed to please them. I’m frustrated, ashamed and heartbroken that a lot of hard work, joy and passion can be leveraged to exploit and harm strangers.”