[OC] Nine seasons of Rick and Morty ratings, checked against nine other shows Visualization

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC] Nine seasons of Rick and Morty ratings, checked against nine other shows" and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on **TL;DR**: Took a look at the episode ratings of Rick and Morty, plus some other shows, did some statistical analysis and drew some conclusions, some of which were surprising (to me, at least). The show's decline is real but ordinary for the genre, and it started at season 5 rather than season 7, and the latter was never review bombed enough for it to matter. What fell wasn't the show's best work, it was its floor. The canon episodes held up right through the worst stretch, and season 7 produced a 9.4 in the same year it produced a 4.4. The standalones are where the drop happened. Things have been climbing back since, with season 9 tracking as the best since season 4, though I'd hold off on strong claims about how big that recovery is.

**Now, the detailed analysis.**

I tagged all 90 aired episodes as canon or standalone. Canon means it moves something forward: the Citadel and Evil Morty, the Rick Prime and Diane material, Space Beth, Birdperson, basically anything that permanently changes where the family stands. Standalone means self contained, everything more or less back to normal by the start of the next episode. Here's my list if anyone wants to take a look at it.

S1: 6, 10, 11 S2: 1, 3, 10 S3: 1, 7, 9, 10 S4: 10 S5: 8, 10 S6: 1, 3, 10 S7: 5, 10 S8: 2, 3, 6, 10 S9: 1, 8, and probably 10 once it airs

*One thing I want to say: some of the episodes were quite ambiguous, like S9E8. I had a hard time with this one, since Morty's lack of empathy seems to have carried over to E9 somewhat, but it also could be correlation with no causation due to E9's topic. Hence, this list more than likely contains some subjectivity, so take it, and every bit of data relying on it, with a pinch of salt.*

||Seasons 1-4|Seasons 5-9|Change| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Canon (24 eps)|8.89|8.38|\-0.51| |Standalone (66 eps)|8.46|7.49|\-0.96|

Standalones fell 1.88x as far. It seems like viewers like episodes which produce lasting effects and/or that's where writer effort is concentrated.

[Average IMDb rating by season, canon episodes against standalone ones, with the gap between them on the right. All 90 aired episodes, IMDb bulk data, 23 July 2026.](https://preview.redd.it/yubfet2lyyeh1.png?width=1344&format=png&auto=webp&s=cb75fb2e666b5ec1874951da4ca2380418633fcf)

Season 7 is the extreme version, kind of an outlier. Its two canon episodes Unmortricken and Fear No Mort average 9.3. The other eight average 6.9 (nice). A 2.4-point split inside one season, larger than the entire nine-season decline.

Canon episodes are also steadier: standard deviation 0.72 against 0.96 for standalones.

In my opinion (based on what I read), a lot of viewers seem to love finales and how every season goes out with a bang. Some have mentioned it feels like the final episodes are somehow much better than all the others. While a simple glance at the ratings seems to confirm this, in reality, the finale effect is a canon effect in disguise. Finales look special (+0.69 over their season average) until you control for canon status, at which point the finale coefficient collapses to +0.29. Finales aren't good because they're finales, but because that's where the plot happens. The gap between canon and standalone episodes persists even if you throw out every finale in the show. One argument could be that finales have had a lot more effort put into them, hence the remaining +0.29.

**Another thing I wanted to take a look at was the decline in quality.** It has been a constant topic, especially with the voice recasting, the Roiland allegations and so on. To get a better picture, I ran the same analysis on nine other long running animated comedies. 3,067 rated episodes total.

|Show|Break at|Gap|Welch t| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |The Simpsons|S11 of 37|1.35|30.8| |Rick and Morty|S5 of 9|0.84|4.9| |Family Guy|S11 of 24|0.76|16.3| |Futurama|S6 of 13|0.67|7.2| |South Park|S15 of 28|0.51|7.7| |American Dad|S10 of 20|0.51|12.4| |BoJack Horseman|none|||

Every one of them breaks somewhere. BoJack is the only outlier, probably because it chose to stop after six seasons, before it had a chance to break.

Two things do stand out for Rick and Morty. First: it broke at season 5, earlier in absolute terms than anything else in the set, and not at S7 as some have reported. Second: it swings harder from episode to episode than any of them, 0.95 standard deviation against a field of 0.42 to 0.81.

On the timing of that break, the simplest and most likely explanation is probably the one written in the credits. Showrunners went Harmon and Roiland for seasons 1 to 3, Mike McMahan for season 4, then Scott Marder from season 5 onward. It could be sheer correlation, but given the nature of the effect a main showrunner has on the show itself, it's likely a causal relationship exists. The break lands exactly where the job changed hands. However, Roiland reportedly slacking off, and working around COVID restrictions would both have been happening around the same time, among other things, so I can't separate any of it out. But the showrunner handoff is the one thing that changed on paper precisely at that point.

**The cross show data also backs up the canon finding regarding finales from a completely different direction.**

|Show|Finale premium| |:-|:-| |Rick and Morty|\+0.57| |BoJack Horseman|\+0.51| |Futurama|\+0.41| |Archer|\+0.36| |Bob's Burgers|\+0.3| |King of the Hill|\+0.23| |American Dad|\+0.09| |The Simpsons|\+0.06| |Family Guy|\-0.01| |South Park|\-0.18|

From the table, it becomes quite clear that the more episodic a show gets, and the less serialized, the lower the finale premium becomes. Rick and Morty topping the chart looks strange at first, since it's heavily episodic with serialized elements rather than deeply serialized like BoJack, and you'd expect it to sit closer to Futurama or Archer.

But looking at my tag list again, I think being a hybrid is exactly why it tops the chart rather than something it manages in spite of. Every single aired Rick and Morty finale is canon. All eight of them. A fully serialized show like BoJack spreads its plot across the whole season, so its finales aren't carrying anything unusual. A fully episodic show has no plot to concentrate anywhere. A hybrid that banks its arc material for the last episode of each season gets the largest premium available to any structure, because it's the only structure where one episode per year carries all of it.

**As for the burning question of Season 7** (voice recast, Roiland dropped, new writers), my findings are quite interesting in my opinion. I started this convinced season 7 was review bombed, especially because so many had a hard time coming to terms with the new voices, or feared the show might take a turn in the wrong direction, or perhaps simply because viewers had enough of the consistent drop in quality. Rotten Tomatoes even supports this at first glance, 77% from critics against 51% from the audience. But it turned out not to be the case, despite so many viewer claiming it to be true.

In all ten shows, episodes with more votes have higher ratings. The correlation runs from 0.32 to 0.77 depending on the show. That's a normal pattern, people are more inclined to review good episodes. Review bombing would drag that correlation toward zero though, since you would get a heap of one star votes on episodes nobody actually sat through. Rick and Morty sits at 0.51, right in the middle of the pack.

Season 7 specifically further evidences this. A campaign against Numbericons, the 4.4, would show up as a vote spike on that one episode. It only pulled 8% more votes than the season median. Meanwhile the season's two best episodes pulled 38% and 36% more. The votes went where the good episodes were, which is the opposite of what brigading looks like.

My best guess on the Rotten Tomatoes gap is sample size. RT has somewhere around a thousand audience ratings for the whole of season 7. IMDb has roughly 110,000 across the same ten episodes. A few hundred irritated people can move an RT score, while they can't really do much to a 12,000 vote average.

**So what's the conclusion here?**

The thing I keep coming back to is that the ceiling never dropped. Season 7 put out a 9.4 in the same year it put out a 4.4. Season 9 has a 9.2 sitting in it. Whatever went wrong along the way, it never stopped the show being capable of great television when it wants to be.

What changed is the floor. Early Rick and Morty could hand you an episode about a pickle, a therapy session, a car battery universe, with no bearing on any ongoing story, and it would land at 9.4 anyway. That's a lot rarer now. The arc episodes still deliver, luckily.

I don't have a tidy explanation for why this is the case, and the model only accounts for about a third of the variation between episodes. I tried looking for more factors and all of them came back weak. Writer history, director, US viewership, format breaking episodes like the clip shows, time elapsed between seasons... The strongest of them only moved R² by 0.01, which is noise.

Giving the model one dummy variable per writer didn't work either. R² jumps to 0.622, which looks fantastic. Cross validated, it scores 0.052, which is barely better than guessing 8.11 every single time (the overall average). The reality is that the rest is just whether a given episode was any good, and no amount of data is going to break that down further.

Another conclusion could be that the break sits at season 5, not season 7. The decline starts two full seasons before Roiland was dropped and the parts were recast. Season 7 is the bottom of it, not the beginning.

That puts the recast in a different light. The recovery came after the recast rather than because of it, since the first recast season was also the worst on record. Season averages since then run 7.38, 7.43, 8.11. Season 7 was the worst the show has had and it also turned out to be the floor. Season 9 is tracking as the best since season 4, and critics moved the same way over those three seasons, 77% to 93% to 100% on RT.

One thing to be careful with: late seasons get rated by a smaller, more self-selected group, so I'd treat the size of the bounce with more suspicion than the direction. Despite that, the finale drops soon and won't change the direction either way.

[If you're interested in the dataset, I've uploaded the Excel sheet to Google Drive.](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xmDQSff_ps_fdHoS-vGY5vlp-mR8qIHP/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=118264028733534556359&rtpof=true&sd=true)

If you're interested in my methodology, most of it is included in the Excel sheet, but I can specify further in the comments, this post is a heck of a read as is without it.

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