The pandemic is…helping Rick and Morty stay on schedule?

The coronavirus pandemic has made it difficult to film new live-action, TV shows and movies, but apparently it’s been good for some animated series.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, MCU star Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson) recently talked about returning to the set of his Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after a coronavirus-mandated break. “Everybody’s very afraid of each other,” he said. “The food is bad because they have to pack it up somewhere else and bring it to us in Ziploc bags. Yeah, it’s awful. You’re literally living in quarantine. It’s not like the NBA bubble where they had a barbershop and friends to hang out with. No, if you get within six feet of somebody, there’s some little Czech dude coming and poking you with a stick saying, ‘You have to move.’ So it’s rough.”

Sounds trying. And it’s a common example of what’s going down on a lot of TV and movie sets right now. No one wants to get the virus, so everyone is putting in place measures to prevent spread. It’s necessary, but in some cases it’s slowed production down to a crawl, with a lot of stops and starts.

However, animation is a different story. Take Rick and Morty, the popular Adult Swim show about a super-genius scientist and his hapless grandson. That show has become infamous for long breaks in between seasons, but according to showrunner Dan Harmon, the coronavirus pandemic has been great for productivity. “It kind of makes you have to focus on the whole process when you don’t have this office environment anymore,” he said a virtual conversation for PaleyFest NY 2020. “Everyone has to run this bee colony remotely, so the honey just gets made more consistently. It’s working for us.”

It makes some sense that animation wouldn’t be affected in the same way that live-action projects would. Animation professionals can in theory work from home anyway, and apparently not being in the office helps the Rick and Morty team focus. So…silver lining?

All that said, Harmon doesn’t say when the show’s next season — its fifth — will be coming out, but it sounds like things are humming along, with him working on seasons five and six at the same time. He promises an episode where Morty has a romance with a girl who isn’t Jessica, and he wants to deepen the relationship between Rick and his son-in-law Jerry, to explain why they haven’t killed each other by now.

“We don’t map it out [the show],” Harmon said, going big picture. “If we simply just keep writing in real time as fast as we can write…by now, that puts us years ahead of the air date of the most recent episode. The last thing we’d want to do in an environment like that is have a plan. We are the plan because we are the future. We’re the guys who wrote the stuff that they’re now drawing, so we make a tremendous effort to stay in the moment and never box ourselves in.”

You can watch the first three seasons of Rick and Morty on HBO Max right now, with the fourth landing on November 1.

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h/t SyFy Wire