Rick and Morty comes back to Adult Swim on May 24 for a ninth season — the second full run with Ian Cardoni as Rick and Harry Belden as Morty, the recast leads who took over after the network cut ties with Justin Roiland in early 2023. Dan Harmon, the show’s surviving co-creator and showrunner, is still running the room. The original family voices have not moved: Chris Parnell stays as Jerry, Spencer Grammer as Summer, Sarah Chalke as Beth. Adult Swim is treating the premiere the way it has always treated Rick and Morty premieres — late Sunday night, no preamble, no relaunch language.

That low-key handling is the news. When Cardoni and Belden first took over the leads for Season 7 in October 2023, every minute of screen time was a referendum on whether the show could survive the loss of the voice that built Rick. Two seasons later — Season 8 finished its run last July — the question has stopped being a question. The recast has held. The audience that mattered showed up. The half-hour episodes still hit the comic beats they used to hit. Season 9’s marketing is, by Adult Swim’s own measure, the least crisis-shaped marketing the show has had since the controversy broke.

The premise that there is still a Rick and Morty in 2026 is itself worth a moment of accounting. The show ran 91 episodes across its first eight seasons; a long-term order from Adult Swim, signed before the Roiland exit, guarantees an extended runway. That order is the backbone holding the post-2023 era together. It removed the renewal question from every episode and let Harmon’s writers room treat the recast period as an artistic problem to be solved, not as an existential crisis to be performed. Sub-decisions followed from the same logic. The new voices were not coached to imitate Roiland — they were coached to inherit the cadence and let their own readings settle. By Season 8 the inheritance had finished settling. Season 9 is the first run that begins with no transition to manage.

What stays in place beyond the cast is structural. The series is still produced by Williams Street with Harmon’s Harmonious Claptrap and the original Starburns Industries credit attached; Justin Roiland’s Solo Vanity Card Productions still appears on the credit crawl, a paperwork ghost rather than a creative role. The episode format remains the half-hour standalone — anthological in feel, multiverse-aware in plotting, equally happy to spend a chapter on a high-concept sci-fi joke or on a low-stakes domestic scene where the family argues over a kitchen appliance. The 2025 run pushed further into Beth’s parallel-self storyline and into Jerry’s slow-motion competence arc; Season 9 is expected to extend both.

Adult Swim’s place in the 2026 animation landscape sharpens the choice to keep treating Rick and Morty as the block’s flagship. Original adult-animation orders have thinned across the major studios — the cost line on a 22-minute animated half-hour has not come down, while ad-supported viewing has — and library properties that retain an active audience are now the assets networks build their late-night blocks around. Rick and Morty is the most durable of those assets at Adult Swim. The series carries a TV-14 rating, a TMDB score of 8.7 across more than ten thousand votes, and a global syndication pattern that has kept the back catalog moving on streamers and on linear cable in tandem. A new season, on schedule, with the same writers’ room intact, is the most valuable thing Adult Swim can put on a Sunday in May.

The Season 9 trailer Adult Swim released earlier this month leans almost entirely on the multiverse machinery the show has been building since Season 6: alternate Ricks, alternate timelines, a return visit or two to characters the writers room had appeared to retire. Spencer Grammer’s Summer gets more material than she has in any recent trailer cut. Sarah Chalke’s Beth is in two of the three trailer beats. The implication is that the family — not the lead duo — is the centre of gravity Harmon wants for the new run. That decision is consistent with the post-recast strategy. If Rick can be recast and the show survives, the show was never as Rick-centric as its title suggested. Season 9 is the season that gets to write from inside that conclusion.

There is one piece of context the premiere does not have to dwell on but will not pretend away. Justin Roiland was charged with felony domestic violence in January 2023; Adult Swim and Cartoon Network cut ties within days. The charges were dropped in March 2024 after prosecutors said they could not meet the burden of proof, but the professional separation held. Roiland has not returned to the show and the network has not signalled any opening for him to return. Three years on, the question of whether the show would split from him cleanly has been answered in practice. Season 9 begins inside that answer rather than asking it.

What the new season opens, beyond the next ten chapters, is the question of how long Harmon’s writers room intends to keep going. Rick and Morty has now outlasted almost every adult-animation peer that launched in the same decade. The long-term order gives it more episodes than most of those peers ever filmed. Whether that order ends with Season 9, with Season 10, or with whatever count Harmon and Adult Swim quietly agree on is a number neither side has volunteered. The show is running on a timeline that nobody outside the room knows, and the recast era has, if anything, made that timeline more interesting to follow.

Sunday’s premiere will land like an Adult Swim Sunday-night premiere — late, brisk, animated cold-open into a multiverse joke, credit sequence, theme music, episode. The trailer has not signalled a tone reset and the cast has not been asked to demonstrate anything beyond doing the work. Season 9 of Rick and Morty arrives as the version of itself the recast period was trying to build: a long-running animated comedy that no longer has to justify its own continued existence.

Rick and Morty Season 9 premieres on Adult Swim on May 24, with new episodes airing late Sunday nights and rolling to HBO Max the following day in supported regions. The series carries a TV-14 rating and is created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland (Roiland’s involvement ended in January 2023). Voice cast: Ian Cardoni as Rick Sanchez, Harry Belden as Morty Smith, Chris Parnell as Jerry Smith, Spencer Grammer as Summer Smith and Sarah Chalke as Beth Smith. Production is Williams Street.

Tags: comedies, animation, TV series, Adult Swim, Dan Harmon, Harry Belden

Rick and Morty returns to Adult Swim for Season 9, three years after Roiland’s exit

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