‘More joyous and sillier than ‘Rick and Morty’: ‘Solar Opposites’ showrunners on creating their own legacy as final season lands (exclusive)

Hulu’s shamelessly adult animated sci-fi series Solar Opposites has certainly pushed acceptable boundaries and fans’ funny bones over the past five seasons with its tale of a bizarre family of extraterrestrial refugees escaping the destruction of their planet, Schlorp, and crash landing on Earth in a generic suburban neighborhood.

Now, Korvo, Terry, Jessie, Yumyulack, and the Pupa will make one final appearance in the sixth and final season, premiering all ten episodes on Oct. 13, 2025.

20th Television Animation’s “Solar Opposites” is delivered by executive producers Mike McMahan (“Rick and Morty,” “Star Trek: Lower Decks”), Josh Bycel (“American Dad”), and Sydney Ryan (“Rick and Morty”). We had the chance to chat with the first two-thirds of the creative trio about this wild final outing.

Solar Opposites Season 6 | The Wall Trailer | Hulu – YouTube

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“Finales are hard, especially in comedy and especially when you don’t want them to happen,” McMahan tells Space.com regarding the show’s semi-sad ending. “We would keep making ‘Solar Opposites’ until we were dust in the ground. We have this big, long arc of the story in The Wall, of these little people stuck in this wall terrarium. We really wanted to do something that felt like both the end of an era, but also a preview of what could keep happening.

“So there’s really cool stuff that ends in The Wall, and there’s also some really cool stories that are offered. We finally bring the SilverCops story to an end in a satisfying way. And we also bring Terry and Korvo and all of the Schlorpians’ story to a resolution in a way that I don’t even know people were expecting. We really made an effort to close the book on that, too, even for characters that didn’t seem like they were in a big dramatic storyline.”

As the unhinged comedy comes to a conclusion, Bycel loves that they took the Solars in a different direction for Season 6 by getting rid of their “funds” to reveal a wealth of latent talents.

“They started as these all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful aliens who had unlimited resources, and over the years we’ve made them more human,” Bycel notes.

“Now all of a sudden, this year they have no money and they have to go out and get jobs and change who they are, and I love that evolution. I love the fact that if it wasn’t for the diamond machine getting destroyed, we’d never have found out that Terry is an amazing romantasy novelist. Or that Yumyulack and Jessie are actually smart. Or that Korvo could break out of his mold of just wanting the mission to succeed, to realize that he’s a great dad and a great husband, and that he actually would be very good at bossing around other people. That one little thing of getting rid of their money allowed us to unlock so much more.”

Adult animation has come into its own over the past decade, and “Solar Opposites” deserves a slot in the conversation of influential shows that will stand the test of time.

“It’s funny, whenever I talk to other people that work on adult animated shows, they’re always big fans of ‘Solar,’ because we do crazy stuff, we take big experimental swings,” McMahan notes.

“In hanging out with ‘The Simpsons” legend Matt Selman, he’s like, ‘Man, you guys get to do stuff that’s so different than what we get to do.’ If ‘Solar’ has a legacy, it’s going to be as a sister show to ‘Rick and Morty,’ I mean, that was the big gorilla, a show that moved the bottom line for an entire corporation. Then our show shows up and we’re dropping all the episodes at once, we’re about a queer-coded couple, and it’s more joyous and sillier than ‘Rick and Morty.’

“It’s why I think ‘American Dad’ did so great,” continues McMahan, noting that the show carved out “its own identity as this funny, interesting thing” that doesn’t have to compete with the shows that spawned it.

“If you binge ‘Solar’ all at once, it’s a really special thing that we might not ever get again. It was a streaming era show that is both equal parts standalone comedy and heavily thought-out and serialized. There’s a million reasons you don’t do something like that. It feels really special and unique, and that’s what stands out.”

Solar Opposites Season 6 Sneak Peek | Korvo’s Got a New “Mound” | Hulu – YouTube

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Bycel had worked on “American Dad” and many other iconic animated shows, but to him, this one project felt from the very beginning like they could almost get away with anything.

“Hulu was so supportive, and because we were the little bastard stepchild to ‘Rick and Morty,’ there weren’t as many eyes on us in the beginning,” explains Bycel. “I think it made us want to experiment as much as we could. Mike and I first bonded over our love of TV and movies, and being latchkey kids raised by afternoon TV. That’s something that was in every episode. There’s so much joy in these characters, even when they were fighting, even when killing each other, there was so much joy, because they were so much fun to write.”

“Solar Opposites” Season 6 streams exclusively on Hulu (US) or Disney+ (UK) starting today, along with the previous five seasons.