(upbeat music)
- (Michael) What’s up, Wisecrack, Michael here. Today we’re talking about one of our
all-time favorite shows, and how that show screwed up a bit. Nothing too touchy right?
- (Archer) Jesus! Somebody a little help!
- (Michael) Archer quickly became one of our most beloved shows thanks to its quickfire banter-
- (Archer) You know how bad that is for your ear drums?
- (Soldier) What? - (Archer) I SAID, DO YOU KNOW HOW -
- (Soldier) I'm kidding, drive the damn car. - (Archer) Ugh, idiot!
- (Michael) Wonderfully psychotic characters
- (Woman) How does it feel to be a murderer? - (Mallory) Shall we find out?
- (Michael) and die hard commitment to chaos and filth.
- (Pam) I don't have cock porn just laying around!
- (Michael) But popularity is a bit of a double-edged sword for a
TV series – higher ratings create more pressure for the show to run and run,
making it harder and harder for the writers to pump out top-tier
television that doesn’t get boring. And some shows crumble under this weight.
- (Lady Gaga) You know what you need?
- (Lisa) Solitude? - (Lady Gaga) Flash mob!
- (Michael) To its credit, Archer has been pretty fearless in its attempts to
solve this problem. But still - something went wrong. Rest assured -- we’re not going on some
anti-Archer tirade. We respect that the show completely overhauled itself on numerous occasions
in increasingly bold ways. But, weirdly, the more Archer changed... the more it kind of...
stayed the same? - and usually, for the worse.
- (Archer) Lana, introspection is the enemy of happiness. So my advice
is - don’t. Always worked for me. - (Lana) Has it, though?
- (Archer) I, I don’t know, that’s the beauty!
- (Michael) No really, and we’ll explain why in this Wisecrack Edition on Archer:
What Went Wrong? And spoilers for Archer ahead.
- (Michael) To figure out what went wrong, we have to figure out what went right.
By Adam Reed’s own admission, Archer is essentially a workplace comedy,
even if it doesn’t look like one at first glance. Whether they’re stealing diamonds or selling
cocaine, the members of ISIS are always steeped in office drama. Their
workplace is defined by gossip, grudges and petty rivalries. Also, flex accounts:
- (Krieger) Owe me six hundred and thirty dollars for my god damn flex account!
- (Michael) HR complaints, and who’s screwing who
- (Lana) And if you want to have ball sloppy sex with me on Cyril's desk, please line up
- (Cyril) I- - (Lana) And take a number.
(Men crowding) - (Pam) You heard the lady!
- (Michael) So just like any other
workplace on TV, really, except with far more weapons training and far less impulse control.
- (Archer) Uh uh, Pam - I will end you.
- (Michael) While there is lots of high drama going on during each episode of
Archer – assassination attempts, high-profile heists, and countless deaths – it is all treated
with exactly the same casual disregard and mild irritation with which your usual
work-place tv characters confront conflict. As a result, Archer gets to function like
a typical workplace comedy, even if the workplace itself is… atypical.
- (Cheryl) Yeah, but then I wouldn't get to hang out with everybody at work.
- (Pam) You hate everybody at work. - (Cheryl) I know. It's the only thing that
gets me out of bed every morning.
- (Michael) Setting a sitcom in an office works well for TV because of how naturally unchanging it
is.Whether it’s a traditional office like, well, The Office, or a failing
bar like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or a police department like Brooklyn 99,
the setting acts as a kind of bubble, fossilizing the characters over time.
The same people clock in at the same time each day, make the same complaints about their job,
and get drawn into the same arguments and flirtations with the same colleagues.
- (Dee) All of this, I've heard
all of this before. No? - (Charlie) Shut up bird!
- (Michael) It makes the fictional workplace relatable,
while also letting the show reset itself after each episode. This repetition can
also highlight just how psychologically stuck characters are. For Sterling,
this means drinking, screwing and shooting himself into a state of emotional numbness...
Every member of the team is the worst version of themselves on repeat – Mallory manipulates
everyone around her so that she can feel in control, Cyril desperately tries to break free
of his beta male image and Lana is forever caught between her revulsion and attraction to Archer.
Their inability to break with their own patterns both provides a constant source of comedy
and makes them feel real – albeit hugely messed up. They are continually undone by the same
weaknesses, just like we all are. Of course, we do see the characters manage to diverge from their
well-worn paths from time to time, even if only a little. Archer is willfully obtuse to the point
that the vast majority of his bad behavior never comes back to haunt him. As a result,
he is highly resistant to learning any sort of lesson from anything.
- (Archer) No, I don't think it's a trap! Although I never do. And it very often is.
- (Michael) However, every so often we catch a glimpse of the person hiding
under Sterling’s tough facade. Like when we learn about his troubled upbringing that left
him emotionally damaged. And he has moments with Lana and Mallory which show that they do
genuinely care about each other, even if they never last that long.
- (Mallory) Just like I taught you, without any help from whoever your father is
- (Archer) Yeah, you were always there for me. Which I never really thanked you for.
- (Michael) Archer’s character is
also rounded out with revelations about his fear of alligators or his attitude towards death. Bit
by bit, these little details, combined with his constant, willful disregard for his own safety,
paint a picture of someone who isn’t just your standard, cartoon sitcom asshole,
but a guy who has a thoroughly and fascinatingly messed up relationship with his own mortality.
- (Lana) Oh, so suddenly you don't have a death wish!
- (Archer) Lana, I've never had a deathwish, it's just that I don't believe that I personally
even can die.
- (Michael) With the employees of ISIS, it’s these incremental bits of growth which
give them their depth and make them more than just walking punch-lines.
Rather than random zaniness, their jokes often play off their own psychology and history.
- (Cyril) I'm pretty sure the Nazis had scientists!
- (Man) No they didn't, that's why we, errr they lost the war!
- (Michael) This kind of joke-laden character development is a prominent feature of other,
successful, long running comedies, like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
- (Mac) This is gay marriage. That's two dudes banging each other.
- (Mac) I don't know where I fit in as a gay man and it's starting to get to me.
- (Michael) But despite the changes, there is still a strong element of repetition for
the whole. Archer is marked with these slow developments. Pam steadily grows from the
group’s punching bag to one of its most formidable agents. Archer is continually forced to re-examine
his relationship as new situations emerge – like when Lana reveals that she’s pregnant
- (Lana) A pregnant woman! - (Guys) What!
- (Michael) Or when Pam also turns out to be, like, the Pele of casual sex.
- (Pam) Well how do you think that makes me feel?
- (Archer) I don't care, Pam! Now having said that, would you please come into this dirty toilet
stall and have sex with me?
- (Michael) For the first few seasons, Archer had a firm grasp of how to drive the show
forward in this way – keeping the core dynamics largely intact while moving the pieces around
just enough to keep things interesting. And, being a cartoon, it felt free to play
a little fast and loose with the continuity, flip-flopping on certain changes – Ray was in
and out of a wheelchair, Cheryl was different kinds of crazy on different days, etcetera.
Even the introduction of The Wee Baby Seamus, legally but not biologically Archer’s son,
provided the perfect way for the show to flirt with the idea of Daddy Sterling without having
to actually commit to it before giving him a child of his own a few seasons later.
- (Lana) Sterling Archer - (Archer) Mee mee
- (Lana) I’d like you to meet your daughter,
Abbiejean.
NARRATOR This flirtation is pretty standard.
The unwillingness to commit to any permanent changes often sees sitcoms locked in never-ending
“will they or won’t they” scenarios because these offer more flexibility,. For example,
if two characters actually couple up, the show has to find a new, funny direction to take them in.
So shows like Archer will largely flirt with consequences rather than actually see them
play out. Health scares, like Archer’s cancer battle, will pop up and then quickly go away:
- (Lana) Ok so, remember when you had cancer? - (Archer) Um, vaguely?
- (Michael) While office romances, like his ongoing connection to Lana,
tend to find themselves endlessly in limbo. And
here’s where things can start to go wrong. At a certain point, no matter how great the show,
this can become stale. As much as we like the comforting familiarity, we eventually get bored.
Archer is pretty explicitly aware of this problem, with characters cracking meta-jokes about their
fear of things becoming too repetitive, most notably through the beloved “phrasing” joke.
- (Archer) Are we not saying ‘phrasing’ anymore?
Guys, I really think we need to talk about getting ‘phrasing’ back in the rotation!
- (Michael) While other shows
have tried to fend off this sense of staleness by introducing new love interests or job changes,
Archer went all in and decided to shift settings entirely. With Archer: Vice,
the show threw out the retro spy thriller template and went off on a cocaine-fuelled jungle bender.
- (Archer) Since the government has unjustly accused us of treason. We
are now forced to transfer those skills from espionage to criminal activity.
Kind of like the A-Team but we sell drugs.
- (Michael) Although, it proved to be something of a mixed bag. The new setting allowed for the
characters to evolve in all kinds of bizarre new directions – like Pam’s transformation into an
uncontrollable coke fiend. And so, from season five on, Archer basically began an ongoing cycle
of radical change and reset. The crew returns to being spies for a while and then get busted by
the US government, forcing them to shift gears again. With the coma seasons, though, is where
things start to really go wrong. Archer put its faith completely in genre-hopping – delving into
Archer’s unconscious mind as a way to transplant the show to a different era entirely. And hey - is
it all that different from the genre hopping the show has already done? From hardboiled noir
to zany space adventures, each new season saw the characters reimagined to fit their new setting. On
paper, this actually seems very smart. What better way to counter sitcom boredom than by making each
new season as different as possible? But what actually happens when Archer goes into a coma
and the characters we know and love go from 1940s LA to outerspace? Nothing great, to be
honest. The coma seasons basically detach all the characters from any sort of continuity because
these characters are just figments of Archer’s imagination who look and act like his colleagues.
Watching how each character fits into the new setup provides lots of room for creativity and
humor, both in how they change and how they stay the same – some characters are reimagined
as monsters, animals and robots while Cyril remains a nebbish dork no matter the context.
But everything that happens is also essentially inconsequential because, for three whole seasons,
we know it will all be erased when Archer wakes up. This doesn’t inherently make for bad
television. In fact, such an approach can really work – The Sopranos famously used frequent dream
sequences and even a pair of comatose episodes in which Tony imagined himself in a completely
different life , much like our catatonic spy. But these episodes worked because, while
nothing Tony saw was “real”, they offered us a deeper look into his psyche and added
to our understanding of his journey through the real world. The moral of that story? Basically,
if you’re going to set a narrative so that it’s literally inside the protagonist’s head,
you need to have something to say about what’s going on in there. Don’t get us wrong - Archer’s
dreamy seasons do achieve this at times. Keeping certain aspects of the show in place
while everything else shifts around underscores some of the show’s essential truths. For example,
no matter the time period or circumstance, Archer finds himself irresistibly drawn to
Lana. In these moments, the show tells us who the characters really are by showing us the parts of
themselves they just can’t seem to get away from. And, at times, the more out-there settings even
provide interesting ways to develop them, like when Cheryl has sex with a literal doomsday device
- (Robot) You may have some unhealthy associations with sex and death.
- (Michael) But again, it’s Archer’s own psyche, and not Cheryl’s... so, who cares?
What’s more, these insights are, unfortunately, few and far between.
For the most part, the change of scenery just makes it easier for the show to re-tell
old jokes. Resetting every character to a generic model which can be jammed into
the new story allows them to repackage old gags like Krieger’s creepiness and Cyril’s:
- (Cyril) Suppressing fire!
- (Michael) It also sees the show tend towards a degree of Flanderization with most of its
cast. Flanderization is the process in which a character becomes increasingly
defined by a single trait. Like how, in The Simpsons, Ned Flanders went from a
gentle-natured do-gooder who happened to be religious to a full blown religious zealot.
- (Lady Gaga) Everyone is beautiful. - (Flanders) Yes, but Jesus said...
uh, basically the same thing. Darn it the Bible said the Devil would be attractive.
- (Michael) Similarly, Pam’s years of hard-won status and self-confidence
are suddenly snapped back so that she can return to being the go-to gross-out punchline, becoming a
literal monster during the gang’s season in space. By extracting them from any larger narrative,
the show quickly reduces its characters to little more than a series of exaggerated
quirks and over-used catch-phrases. Archer and all of his friends are left basically catatonic,
still alive but frozen in place. The truth is that, rather than solving the boredom which
can seep in as a sitcom runs on for multiple seasons, Archer’s wild genre-jumping acted
as a way of cheating or disguising the very problem it was trying to escape.
It frees the show from having to keep its characters in motion – interesting avenues
like Archer’s parenthood or his attempts to be a faithful partner are abandoned so
that the show doesn’t have to figure out what the hell to do with him in this new context.
While the setting and genre might change, the interior lives of the characters remain totally
static. Rather than solving the problem of sitcom stasis, the coma seasons basically just dress it
up in a different costume and hope the viewer won’t notice that nothing has actually changed.
But rest assured, it’s not all doom and gloom for the series. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the show
has managed to fight this stasis by well, taking a GIGANTIC leap back to how things used to be.
What happens is - Season 11 sees Archer awake from his coma and ready to resume his role at
ISIS – the spy agency which is somehow back in operation, working out of the same old building
with the same old staff as if nothing ever happened. Almost as if miraculously saving us from
the minor failures of the previous three seasons. This kind of hard reset might seem like an
admission of defeat – like the band who realizes that none of its new material is working so agrees
to just play the hits from now on. But it’s already done a much better job at keeping the
show fresh than the coma seasons ever did. While the surface details are the same as early seasons,
the deeper layers are vitally different. Archer is forced to re-integrate himself into a team that
no longer really needs him – Cyril is now a superspy, Lana is married, and the whole
agency is vastly more ethical, efficient and cost-effective than it ever was when he was there.
- (Cyril) I'm just going by the book!
And Archer – a man pathologically in need of attention – has to learn to live in a
world that he’s not the center of. Even his favourite group jokes have gone out of fashion.
- (Archer) Woah! Sploosh right? - (Pam) Oh...
- (Ray) Yeah… we don’t do that any more - (Archer) You don't? Uh What,
Sploosh? Yo-yo-you have to Sploosh. You all Sploosh,
everybody Splooshes. - (Woman) I do not sploosh.
- (Michael) These shifts
in power dynamics create changes which are actually far more meaningful than any of the
“alternate setting” seasons could yield. And as a result, we see new sides to each character.
Cyril is an obsessively-sculpted mass of muscle built on a foundation of raging insecurity.
- (Cyril) Ah! Cheesy Pete's that keeps happening. The dangers of increased muscle mass I guess.
- (Michael) Lana has achieved the sort of peace, companionship and professionalism in
her life that she always thought she wanted. Pam, who began as the hapless HR rep, has
become a self-assured, competent, emotionally-aware member of the team.
- (Pam) It's been three years numb nuts! We've had a whole thing going without you!
Can't you just make an effort to fit yourself in?
- (Michael) And beyond that, the show even
manages to transform the ongoing anxiety about backsliding from problem into a major theme –
- (Cyril) We must keep moving forward.
- (Michael) A meta turn which allows it to effectively self-analyze without disappearing up
its own ass completely. But what do you think, Wisecrack? Did you enjoy the creative freedom
that the comatose seasons provided or would you rather see Archer keep his eyes open from now on?
Let us know what you think in the comments. Big thanks to our patrons as always and try not
to spill anything while you hit that subscribe button. Because that is how you get ants. Also
ring that bell -- it won’t give you tinnitus. And of course, thanks for watching. Later.