The Unapologetic Instability of Archer
The former spy thriller spoof series' many changes subvert TV narrative coherence.
From the moment that it premiered on FX in 2009, Archer made it clear that it was something special. It took the caustic irony of a workplace comedy like The Office and combined it with the raunchy and ludicrous humor of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to create a show that was a ludic send-up of the spy films of earlier eras. Focusing on the fictional International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS), Archer started out as, essentially, a workplace sitcom, with a traditional focus on the fraught relationships and dynamics among the various characters. Starting with the fifth season, however, it shifted its premise, beginning an era in which each season would have a different thematic focus and, from the eighth to the tenth seasons, it became an anthology series (with ever more fantastic settings and scenarios) until returning to its spy agency roots in the eleventh.
To some degree, this shift in emphasis was dictated by external events, since the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East--commonly known as ISIS--made the use of that name in an irreverent spy series seem in poor taste (even for a show like Archer, which reveled in such things). However, the show’s creator, Adam Reed noted in interviews that he was ready to shake things up anyway; geopolitical considerations just gave him an excuse to jettison the organization’s original name and purpose.
This abrupt shift is of a piece with the iconoclastic attitude that made the series so popular in the first place, an ethos that was very similar to that of the other adult animated series that grew in popularity in the 2000s and 2010s, including Family Guy, Futuruama, and the numerous animated series that aired on Adult Swim. These series seemed to delight in rebelling against animation’s association with children and G-rated fare. Furthermore, animation, unlike live action, has a certain playfulness already built into it. When audiences tune into an animated show, they do so knowing that in all likelihood it isn’t going to follow the established rules of their own reality. From the hyperbolic violence of classic Looney Tunes to the dreamscapes of the Disney Renaissance, animation has always invited viewers to step into a world that is more beautiful, more bizarre, and often more unstable and dangerous than reality.
Archer has always excelled in this regard, featuring an animation that is, at times, simply gorgeous. This has been evident from the beginning, since the character design of Archer himself--piercing blue eyes, chiseled facial features, sculpted body--renders him an object of desire, and the other characters possess a similar level of visual detail and finesse. As the series has gone on, its animation has become ever more fluid and flexible, enabling the creative team to take the characters into more exotic locations and scenarios and helps to explain why the series can take so many liberties with its own internal mythology.
Of course, animated series have seldom held themselves to the same rules of continuity as their live-action counterparts, which is notable given that the rise of the internet enabled fans to more easily spot errors in continuity in live-action series. In the world of animation, literally anything can happen, and Archer takes full advantage of the creative possibilities inherent in the form. This sense of ludicrous play is especially obvious in the ninth and tenth season, subtitled Danger Island and Archer: 1999 respectively. Just as the earlier seasons were a send-up of the spy film, Danger Island seeks to subvert the tropes associated with danger films such as Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone and 1999 goes after such science fiction staples as Alien and Star Trek. While the characters are still recognizable as themselves, they might not be the same species as they were in the beginning. Thus, Archer tries to have it both ways, providing audiences with the same characters that they’re familiar with while totally changing their milieu.
Archer’s shift of gears mid-run is all the more striking considering the increasing dominance of serialized television, what the scholar Jason Mittell has called “complex TV.” Over the past several decades, Mittell argues, we’ve seen television become ever more narratively complex, as the rise of serial narratives has required audiences to keep track of multiple threads, many of which are extended over several episodes and even several seasons. As a result, television asks more and more from its viewers, who have to compete with multiple storylines, temporalities, and character viewpoints.
In choosing to change its entire setup, then, Archer makes use of its established ethos to satirize not just spy dramas but television itself. For, just as much as complex TV came to occupy such a dominant position in the cultural landscape in the 2000s and 2010s, it was joined by several anthology dramas, series that changed their cast, their settings, and their basic premise with each season. It is perhaps no accident that the most prominent of anthology dramas--namely, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story--became one of the flagship series of FX, the very same network that Archer calls home.
However, the shifts in Archer’s setting, it turns out, are the product of Sterling’s dreams while he’s in a coma from a gunshot wound suffered in the seventh season. This turn of events forces a recognition that all of these changes have been nothing more than a figment of the main character’s imagination. The very nature of narrative continuity has thus been both challenged and reaffirmed. The multiple realities that it has taken such care to construct with each season are, in fact, contained with the same diegetic reality: Sterling’s comatose brain.
The eleventh season of the series marked yet another shift, as Archer awoke from his coma to find that a lot had changed. And, in yet another twist--or, perhaps, a revolution--the setting had returned to its original New York, where it remains. As it has from the beginning, the series encourages its audience not to take it, or television more generally, all that seriously, to take pleasure in the instabilities of narrative storytelling. Whatever setup is established in one season can quite easily be jettisoned in favor of another in the next. However, as much as it might try to subvert the conventions of complex television in all of its forms, in a strange way Archer has become the very thing it set out to critique.