The best joke in the “President Curtis” pilot is one the show plays on itself. Curtis needs a ride to the moon, so he borrows a spacecraft from Rick Sanchez (Ian Cardoni) and Morty Smith (Harry Belden), and while he is standing there apologising for the various times he has tried to have them killed, Morty makes a crack about how quickly spinoffs get made these days. Rick’s answer is that he gives the show ten episodes. Season 1 is ten episodes. And Adult Swim had already renewed it for a second one, days before anybody watched the first.
“Pilot” went out July 26 on Adult Swim at 11:30pm, straight off the back of the “Rick and Morty” season 9 finale, with HBO Max picking it up the next day. Dan Harmon and James Siciliano created it and co-wrote the first episode, Fill Marc Sagadraca directed, and Lighthouse Studios is doing the animation. Keith David is back as President Andre Curtis, a character he has now been playing on and off for eleven years, and the new regulars around him are Banks (Stephanie Beatriz), a cyborg White House chief of staff, and Special Agent Francis O’Doyle (Jim Rash), a half-leprechaun in the Secret Service.
The pitch is simple and it is the right one: this is the show about the problems Rick will not get out of bed for. Interdimensional diplomacy, paranormal callouts, cryptid paperwork, all of it landing on a president who has no portal gun and no genius and has to solve things with staff, budget and nerve. Whether that premise can hold ten episodes without the parent show propping it up is the real question, and the pilot answers it by using Rick once and then closing the door. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “President Curtis” pilot, including what the American government left on the moon.
Rick’s answer is that he gives the show ten episodes. Season 1 is ten episodes. And Adult Swim had already renewed it for a second one, days before anybody watched the first.”
The episode opens the way a workplace comedy opens, which is the first sign it knows what it is. Banks turns up for her first day as chief of staff and gets walked through the morning briefing, and the morning briefing is where the show establishes its entire tonal range in about ninety seconds. Paul Bunyan is dead. There has been a doppelgobbler sighting. None of this is treated as remarkable by anybody in the room, and Beatriz plays Banks as a competent person absorbing an impossible job rather than as a straight man reacting to weirdness, which is a better choice and a harder one.
Underneath the cryptid admin there is a tape. A CIA agent is trying to get hold of Apollo 11 footage that has never been released, and the reason he wants it is blackmail rather than history. That thread is the spine of the episode and it is a genuinely good structure for a first outing, because it forces Curtis to be a president rather than a punchline. He cannot portal away from an intelligence agency holding leverage over him. He has to out-manoeuvre it.
Then Banks and O’Doyle find out what is actually on the footage, and the show plants its flag. The United States bred a child specifically for the Apollo 11 mission, fathered by John F. Kennedy, and left him up there. His name is Adam. He has been alone on the moon since 1969, he has grown up, and he has spent the entire time understanding that he is the rightful president of the United States. It is a swing, and it lands, because the episode plays the horror of it straight for a beat before it plays the comedy.
Getting to him is where Rick and Morty walk in, and the show handles the cameo with more self-awareness than most spinoffs manage. Curtis needs transport, Rick has transport, and the scene exists to acknowledge that you are watching a spinoff before getting on with not being one. Harmon put it plainly to SyFy Wire: “Even if just as an homage to the concept of spinoffs as we’re familiar with them, [it] just feels like a thing that if it weren’t there, you would maybe feel like it was missing.” He compared it to garnishing a cake. The garnish goes on, and then the cake is finished, and Rick does not come back.
The moon sequence itself is the weakest stretch, and it is weak for a specific reason: Adam is a better idea than he is a fight. A man raised in isolation who believes the presidency is his by birth is a premise you could run a whole season on, and the pilot has to wrap him up in an act, so he becomes an obstacle to be subdued rather than a person to be reckoned with. Curtis and his team take him. That is that.
The ending is where the episode is smartest. Curtis does not neutralise the blackmail by winning a fight or making a deal. He goes public with the thing he was being blackmailed about, which turns out to be an incident in the White House gym, and the leverage evaporates the second he says it out loud. It is a small, unheroic, actually presidential solution to the problem, and it tells you more about who this character is going to be than the moon did.
What makes the whole thing work is Keith David, and it is worth remembering how long a runway this character had. He started in “Get Schwifty” as an unnamed president who was more or less an Obama stand-in with a couple of good lines, picked up the surname Curtis in season 5, and did not get a first name until season 7. Eleven years of scattered appearances have given David a version of this man that is already fully built when the pilot starts, so the show never has to spend a scene introducing him. It can spend that time on Banks and O’Doyle instead, which is exactly what it does.
So the pilot is a success, and the season 2 order that arrived before it is either confidence or a hedge, depending on your view of how Adult Swim schedules things. What it definitely is, is a decision made without any of the information the show has now given us. The pilot proves this thing can hold its own frame, tell a complete story, use its inherited asset once and put it down. Rick gave it ten episodes. The network gave it twenty before the first one aired. On the evidence of the first, the network is the one who read the room correctly, and Rick is going to be annoyed about that.
What Do You Think? Was leaving Adam on the moon after one episode a waste of the best idea in the pilot, or is he coming back? Can a “Rick and Morty” spinoff really run on staff meetings and cryptid paperwork without the portal gun? And after eleven years of being a background joke, is Andre Curtis strong enough to carry twenty episodes of his own show?
See you on the next binge!
