Yeahhh... I agree. Completely. Ironically I started liking the show when it toned down the atrocities and started hitting Rick more often (I think it was after season 2) and I quickly felt frustrated because there was a lot of room for improvement, a lot of promises of improvement, but it just turns back down to status quo. I think I gave up after the episode about heists (I saw others, but this is the last one I remember watching, that and the train about metanarrative). What pissed me off is that there was a lot of really good themes that were just smeared with the show\'s tiresome humor.
Weirdly, its a trait I see in all Mcmahan shows, and I\'m aware Mcmahan bailed out of Rick and Morty. Unlikeable protagonists who shows promises of getting better but, surprise, they don\'t. Or they say they get better but are still as atrocious as always.
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Dimortying Rickturns (OR Please Stop Belaboring The Point)
Rick And Morty is wonderfully inventive, brilliantly funny, and occasionally features genuine drama and even tragedy... but sad to say, from season 2 onwards, it slowly falls victim to the same problem that's poisoned so many other comedies: if the formula's never going to change and the asshole protagonist isn't going to change... then what's the point in paying attention?
As has been noted by other reviewers, Rick is a pretty shameless Sue character: his many self-destructive habits don't do much to slow him down, everyone who disagrees with him is proved wrong, and most of his enemies are defeated with comical ease. Also, any parody episodes will usually be an excuse for Rick (or possibly the writers) to get his fedora on and whine about how stupid a popular film/series/trope is in the unfunniest way possible.
However, what gets me down about him are the episodes that actually drop the Sueish pretenses and feature him being utterly pathetic or even genuinely defeated - not because they're bad. Indeed, they're some of the best episodes in the show. Trouble is, they're usually followed up with an aggressive return to form in which Rick gets to be an even bigger Sue than usual.
Similarly, Rick's occasional moments of humanity or tragedy seem more like excuses for his terrible behavior the more they're used. There's no real character development: it just means that he swings wildly between committing atrocities and demanding sympathy from the audience.
And those atrocities? They're getting boring. I mean, we know he's an asshole by now, so we shouldn't need to belabor the point, right?
But no, across seasons three to five, we keep lagging around in yet more episodes in which Rick either does something horrible or is found to have done something horrible, with only a few genuinely brilliant moments buried in them like diamonds hidden inside dog turds. Meanwhile, the really clever and meaningful episodes like those of the Evil Morty arc have been left to gather dust between the ranks of pedestrian one-offs.
Finally, the shock of "Rick Potion Number 9" has worn off in the face of obnoxious repeats, leaving the multiverse just another enabler for Rick's nihilistic bastardry. If all the myriad worlds really are all the same and all the components are replaceable to the point of insanity, then Rick is definitely justified in not caring... but unfortunately, so is the audience.
Ultimately, I gave up on this show in the first episode of season 6 - but like Doctor Who before it, my enthusiasm for it had been bleeding away for seasons on end, and the final straw was simply the realization that it wasn't interested in improving the status quo. The astronomical surge of hope in the season 5 finale was just an obligation the show had to face before it could get back to the mess of potage it was enjoying, and from hereon, it was only going to be more of the same onanistic dreck.
And that's the waaaaay the news goes.