It somehow manages, in 20 minutes, to parody the breadth of the fourth series of The Wire and, almost accidentally, do a half-decent job of imitating it to boot. It’s part cynical political drama, part gritty cop show, part wistful coming-of-age tale and does more in one episode than most shows do in their entire run. It also contains the most disturbing gag of the series: a “simple” Rick (not all alt-reality Ricks are geniuses) is strapped down and is replaying over and over again in his mind the birthday of his young daughter while his never-ending tears are industrially milked for use in a wafer cookie (“Come home to the impossible flavour of your own completion,” says the voiceover of the advert for them. “Come home to Simple Rick’s”). 

The show has been such a break-out hit that after its third series it was renewed for a frankly unheard of order of 70 new episodes. 

Though the less said about the floating testicle from the fourth dimension who polices the timeline, voiced by Jordan Peele, the better. 

Rick And Morty is, as you can probably tell by the above, deeply male in tone and this is partly where the problems lie. 

As fan communities now have endless forums and formats to debate and discuss, there’s been a shift from simply being a fan of something to somehow assuming ownership of it. The combination of Reddit boards and social media means internet die-hards begun viewing their roles not as passive viewers, but as active policers. Some critic doesn’t like the latest Marvel film that you’re pretty sure you’ll love? Get ’em. 

And this curious urge – worse in the sci-fi and superhero genres and infinitely worse in young male fans – has reached its nadir in the young, male sci-fi fandom of Rick And Morty. 

Even mentioning the show my colleagues at GQ provoked a response of mild disgust. They hadn’t seen it, one said, but had always been put off because of the fans. I know exactly what they mean. And it has only gotten worse. 

When, in a joke in the third-series premiere, Rick says his whole motivation isn’t to avenge anyone’s death, but was instead “driven by finding that McNugget sauce. That’s my series arc”, referring to a promotional Szechuan dipping sauce that McDonald’s used to sell in the late 1990s for a promotional tie-in with the movie Mulan, the fans took him at his word and the very next day began online petitions to demand its return. McDonald’s, never one to bypass free PR, announced a few months later the sauce would come back for a limited time. But it didn’t have enough for the demand, so the fans then protested – online and in person – and, in some cases, the police were called. To repeat: McDonald’s dipping sauce. 

If sauce entitlement is one thing, the fans took it to a whole new level by the end of the third series. The Rick And Morty writing room had always been a bro club and so creator Harmon had hired some new female comedy writers to even out the imbalance. The fans, convinced they were the cause of what they saw as a dip in quality in the third series, went after the new female writers online individually, abusing, threatening and slandering them on Twitter and creating Reddit threads just to smear them. They even doxed them, publishing their personal information online.