Movies and TV Shows

I first heard about FX’s “Archer” in the ready room of VAQ-135, a navy squadron who were serving an interminable deployment aboard an aircraft carrier somewhere near Midway Island. (This sounds very much like a humblebrag that Sterling Archer would obnoxiously drop into conversation). It was 2010, and the pilots had lost whatever idealism they’d once had during an endless deployment that had them flying 12-hour missions from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. I started hearing the officers stage-whisper “danger zone” whenever one of them got called in to see the commanding officer over some minor fuck-up or summoned to the flight deck in the pitch black of an ocean night.

Now, famously, “Danger Zone” is a Kenny Loggins song that plays a significant role in the homoerotic original recipe “Top Gun,” the urtext of naval aviators. But the way the pilots were saying it suggested they were taking the piss. Eventually, one of them explained to me that “danger zone” was one of the catchphrases of Sterling Archer, the dissolute Bond-on-a-bender at the center of “Archer,” a spy comedy that had premiered the year before. Sterling, a pilot explained, was the son of the louche and alcoholic Malory Archer who’d founded a spy agency populated by a half-dozen other assholes who ran profoundly dangerous and pointless missions for a revolving series of international actors.

I was working on a book and cosplaying at being a Navy officer, and then flew off the carrier to head up to NAS Whidbey Island, where I checked into the base hotel in pursuit of my first good night sleep in a month. There, I made the happy mistake of downloading the first season of “Archer,” and that was that. I didn’t fall asleep — instead I fell in love, which says something about me that I’m not sure is completely positive.

The first episode begins with Sterling (H. Jon Benjamin) strung up on a wall about to be tortured. His handler speaks in a bad Russian accent: “Sterling Archer, code name Duchess, known from Berlin to Bangkok as the world’s most dangerous spy.” An unimpressed Archer then asks his tormentor if he is going to be tortured with the flaccid voltage of the guy’s go-kart battery. The man sighs, the lights go on and behind a two-way mirror is silver-haired Malory Archer, voiced by Jessica Walter, expressing exasperation. We quickly learn that this is a simulation, and Archer’s code name of “Duchess” is also the name of Malory’s dog who she loved very much — as we see in a portrait of dog and Malory posing naked like John and Yoko.

The use of Bangkok is also not an accident, as Sterling is the male slut of the 21st Century, or the 20th Century, as the time of the show is comically never established and is somewhere in the 1960 to 2020 range. (There are Cold War standoffs, but also cellphones and desktop computers). Sterling never knew his father; Malory isn’t even quite sure who it was, perhaps a KGB spy or maybe Buddy Rich. (Sterling inherited the libertine gene from his mother).

The wordplay between Malory and Sterling is the diseased artery that keeps the blood of the show pumping. In an early episode, Malory warns Sterling to keep his least savory dates away from her pharmaceutical stash.

Malory: I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a Pez dispenser.
Archer: That wasn’t her fault! Who puts Oxycontin in a Xanax container?
Malory: People with servants!
Archer: But if they’re stealing pills, how does it help to switch the labels?
Malory: Because they can’t read English!

“Archer” is the sole creation of Adam Reed, who wrote or co-wrote the first 103 of the show’s 142 episodes. The setup is that of a standard workplace comedy, with the twist that every character is a narcissistic asshole. It is set in the Manhattan offices of the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS). (It was named before “ISIS” became a known actual terrorism organization, and was dropped in 2015 as a result.) On the show, ISIS is populated by assorted arsonists, careerists and food addicts, starting with Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) as Sterling’s Black sometimes girlfriend. She is beautiful and ambitious, but has unseemly large hands alternately described as the size of cricket bats or Johnny Bench’s catcher mitt. The agency features HR director Pam Poovey (Amber Nash) the daughter of a Wisconsin dairy farm who has a weight problem until she discovers cocaine and develops a drug problem. Her subordinate is Cheryl Tunt (Judy Greer) who likes to be choked, start fires and is later revealed to be the heiress to the Tunt railroad fortune. In the back lab is Krieger (Lucky Yates), a scientist of sorts who was raised in Brazil, possibly conceived with Hitler’s DNA. Then there’s Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell), an often cuckolded agency accountant who is charisma-free if well-endowed. Watching with a side eye is agent Ray Gillette, a gay Southern dandy voiced by Reed, who battles with the semi-homophobic Sterling over pressing issues such as whether Ray’s bronze medal from the Winter Olympics makes him a loser. (Ray insists it was a triumph, but when Sterling leaves the room he sighs and drawls, “It was a huge disappointment.”)

“Archer” is driven by black humor and black hearts. It has something in common with fellow FX show “The League,” which also debuted in 2009 (and ran until 2015), and it’s hard to see either show being greenlit in the allegedly more enlightened time of 2023 with their helpings of gay jokes and rampant misogyny. Yet there was a significant difference between the two shows. There was exactly one woman and no gay characters or people of color in “The League’s” main cast, and the men’s boorishness is celebrated. “Archer” is different: Every time Sterling expresses his 1950s view of women, race relations or gay life, he is pummeled —both verbally and physically — by his so-called colleagues.

Sterling is the focus of the show, but he is no hero. We all can see he is a pathetic alcoholic who will never get his mother’s approval. (She’d passed on Sterling’s parenting duties to his British valet Woodhouse, who Sterling pays back by rubbing fine sand into his eyes for sport. This may or may not be why Woodhouse is a heroin user).

None of this would work if “Archer” didn’t have the best voice cast in the history of animated television. (You can throw projectiles at me, just know I am in my underground bunker). The acidic banter flows seamlessly like you are in a Tylenol with caffeine fever dream. Benjamin’s Archer has a stentorian super- spy voice that is a perfectly comic counterpoint to his actual buffoonery. Walter did a variation of Lucille Bluth if she was always randy and reminiscing about lost sex weekends in Phuket. Nash’s Pam has a vulnerability, not much seen on the show, as she pounds Tall Boys for breakfast and participates in bum fights. I’m not saying “Archer” is on the level of, say, “The Simpsons” or “Bojack Horseman,” but the cast is a notch above.

While some “Archer” seasons have arcs, most are contained 22 minutes of dyspeptic laughs with a side helping of Reed playing with the concept of comedy catchphrases, including Sterling shouting “Phrasing!” whenever someone makes an inadvertent double entendre, which happens about 17 times each episode. But even this is a snarky wink: In a later season Archer shouts “Phrasing!” and the rest of the agency informs him they’re not doing that anymore, to his great disappointment.

“Archer” is the sitcom equivalent of Oasis, whose early stuff is flawless, but whose later seasons, while uneven, still contained some banger singles. There is not a duff episode in the first seven seasons, with the best ones including guest voice work from cable legends, including Matthew Rhys, Timothy Olyphant, Anthony Bourdain, and Walters’ real-life husband Ron Liebman as Malory’s mismatched boyfriend Ron Cadillac. The ability of Reed to establish the crew quickly in different scenarios — whether it be as undercover workers in Bourdain’s kitchen, or in the countryside of Rhys’ native Wales — proves how deftly Reed created his characters.

Alas, this is “Archer,” so not all is sunshine and merry-go-round ride. At some point around 2017, when the show switched from FX to FXX, it seems like someone made a bet with Reed about how insane he could make “Archer” without the show getting canceled. Sterling went into a coma — no, really — and the show time traveled, in no particular order, to 1947 Hollywood, a 1930s Pacific island, outer space and on the Oregon Trail in the 1860s. (OK, I made the last one up). Reed left after Season 10, and the show stumbled some more after the death of the irreplaceable Walter in 2021. I can only hazard a guess that “Archer” was left to soldier on by FX knowing it could run endless midnight “Archer” marathons to stoned college kids for decades.

Miraculously, “Archer’s” final season has been a return to the show’s classic roots, with Kane assuming Malory’s seat as head of the agency and new London agent Zara Khan (Natalie Dew) playing Sterling’s new foil who enrages the decaying playboy because she is his doppelganger: Overconfidence and narcissism ooze from her perfect pores.

Tonight, “Archer” signs off. There’s an embargo on the episode’s details, but if you think the final chapter will feature a wedding or some happy wrap-up you haven’t been paying attention. Sterling Archer and his colleagues remain irredeemable jerks. Just the way we have always loved them.