Jessica Gao, an Emmy-award winning writer for Rick and Morty is exiting the Adult Swim series after just one season. She is responsible for writing ‘Pickle Rick,’ undoubtedly the standout episode of season three. Gao will move on to run her own series, just ordered to pilot by ABC.
Gao’s untitled series will, according to the show’s official description, follow “a first-generation Chinese-American woman who struggles to set healthy boundaries with her crazy, exhausting family. When her wealthy grandmother dies and names Janet the sole inheritor, she suddenly finds herself the unwilling new matriarch of the family she’s spent her life trying to keep at arm’s length.”
For its third season, Rick and Morty made a move towards a more balanced writers room by hiring more female and minority writers. Toxic members of the fanbase lashed out at those writers, with some even targeting a female writer with a doxx attack. Creator Dan Harmon spoke with EW about the incident. “I’m on a Twitter sabbatical, so the last thing I saw about that was [the Reddit thread detailing the harassment], and I’ve seen the tweets they’ve sent to the [unnamed] female writer,” He said. “I was familiar going into the third season, having talked to Felicia Day, that any high-profile women get doxxed, they get harassed, they get threatened, they get slandered. And part of it is a testosterone-based subculture patting themselves on the back for trolling these women … I think it’s all disgusting.”
Season four of Rick and Morty is currently in development with no release date planned.
