Adam Reed’s Archer aired on FX from September 17, 2009 to December 17, 2023, fourteen seasons and a three-part finale called Archer: Into the Cold. It is an adult animated sitcom about a spy agency staffed entirely by people who should not be trusted with a stapler, and it stayed funny far longer than a show built on rapid-fire dialogue has any right to.
Trailer, via FX Networks.
Sterling Archer
H. Jon Benjamin voices Sterling Archer, a narcissistic, philandering secret agent whose competence in the field never once extends to his personal life. Benjamin’s flat, bored delivery is the engine of the show. Archer is never surprised by anything, including his own failures, and that unflappable self-regard is what makes him bearable.
The Agency
The setting is ISIS, the International Secret Intelligence Service, a fictional New York intelligence outfit run by Malory Archer, Sterling’s abusive mother. Around them are Lana Kane, voiced by Aisha Tyler, his on-and-off lover and the mother of his daughter, plus Cyril Figgis, Pam Poovey, Cheryl Tunt and Dr. Krieger, voiced by Chris Parnell, Amber Nash, Judy Greer and Lucky Yates.
The joke is that every one of them is broken in a specific, consistent way, and the show never fixes anyone. Fourteen years of the same damaged people is either a limitation or a philosophy. Archer makes it a philosophy.
The Look
Reed conceived the show after the cancellation of his Adult Swim comedy Frisky Dingo, and a vacation in Spain shaped his taste for adventure comedies. The animation is limited by design, drawn from mid-century comic art, and the whole thing is set in an anachronistic parody of Cold War spy thrillers. Rotary phones sit next to laptops and nobody explains it. That refusal to explain is part of the comedy.
Reinvention
What kept Archer alive was its willingness to blow itself up. Individual seasons moved the cast into the Latin American drug trade, 1940s film noir, the interwar South Pacific and a retro-futuristic space opera. Some of those detours were better than others, but they gave a show that could have died of repetition a new set of jokes every year.
Where It Slips
The actors recorded their lines separately, and you can sometimes hear it. The rhythm of a scene is assembled rather than played, and in weaker episodes the meta-comedy and reference jokes pile up faster than they land. The middle seasons also lean on running gags until a few of them are running on fumes.
The Verdict
Archer won four Primetime Emmys and four Critics Choice Awards, and it moved to FX’s sibling network FXX in 2017. Fourteen seasons is a long run for a show this mean. It earned it by being precise about its characters and merciless about its jokes, and by knowing exactly when to change the scenery.
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