Let's Check in With "Archer"

So the newest season of FX's "Archer" has been rolling along nicely. The adults-only animated spy spoof is currently in its fourth season, and has picked up two new recurring characters. First there's Ron Cadillac (Ron Leibman), Malory's new husband, and Rodney (Andrew Donnelly), the ISIS armory's new clerk. Also, Ray is now a cyborg with robot legs, Cyril is dating Lana again, and Pam seems to be on the verge of becoming a new ISIS field agent. Barry and Katya have been making multiple appearances throughout this run of episodes, clearly being set up to for a big showdown a few episodes from now. And Sterling Archer? Though he occasionally shows tiny signs of growth, he's still the immature, emotionally stunted, spycraft savant man-child that we all know and love. And the show is full of just as much blood and guts and perversion and hilarity as ever.

However, the success of "Archer" has afforded it a few perks. The limited animation has been getting more animated, tackling more ambitious visuals, including several action scenes and better looking CGI vehicles. The guest star roster has also gotten more high-powered. Burt Reynolds famously stopped by last season, and this year an entire episode parodied reality television cooking shows with the help of Anthony Bourdain playing a pompous version of himself. For me, the biggest improvement is that at this point in the show's run, the shock value of the content has largely worn off, but the writers and the cast have become so comfortable in this universe that they can do more character-focused pieces and introduce characters that might not have worked in earlier seasons. Ron Cadillac is a good example, a charming older gent whose courtship of Malory happened off screen, and who has been played fairly straight so far. Cadillac displays no extreme behavior, and gives no reason for Archer to hate or suspect him, except we know that Archer's relationship with his mother has always been pretty warped, and Malory's love life has been colorful, to say the least. The old ultraviolence is still in play, but the writers don't need to go there as often.

I'm pretty settled on Pam and Cheryl being my favorite characters in the show, because the two of them are so horrible in such an entertaining way. Cheryl being a masochist and an airhead wouldn't fly anywhere else on television, but she's so cheerfully self-assured about it, and her inanity is taken to such wonderful extremes. It's one thing if the bimbo is just around to be saved by the show's heroes over and over again. It's quite another if her incompetence keeps making bad situations worse, and she just finds it hilarious. Pam is even more of a jerk because she's the smarter of the two, and she should know better, but on the other hand, everyone in ISIS is pretty awful in their own special way, so her apathy actually comes off as pretty reasonable most of the time. Also, I love that she's the biggest girl in the room, and she enjoys it. We've seen that Pam's very sexually active and more than capable of handling herself in a fight. Compared to these two, the rest of ISIS's roster of corporate drones can't compete.

I have to say that as far as late-night cartoon action spoofs go, I still prefer "Venture Bros.," which is finally returning to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim in a few more weeks. "Venture" has a bigger universe, a more well-developed mythology, and more complex character relationships, so it tends to be more resonant underneath all the pop-culture references. "Archer," even though it can consistently get big laughs out of me, is much more shallow and disposable. It's still very committed to a very particular level of humor, and has only recently started poking around into deeper, more emotionally interesting places. The Lana/Archer/Ray love triangle has been heating up again, and Archer's had a few moments of real self-examination this year. Then again, getting in too deep could easily spoil that great satirical tone that "Archer" has developed, and it's still among the better comedies on television right now.

FX has already renewed "Archer" for a fifth season, and its success has contributed to the continued expansion of late night animation offerings. FOX Network, which is in the same corporate family tree as FX, is about to launch a Saturday night expansion of its "Animation Domination" programming block to compete with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim in July. These late-night cartoons for grown-ups are no longer a rarity, but they still don't get as much respect as they should. So it's nice to see "Archer" thriving and kicking ass in the ratings. I fully understand why some are still skeptical of these shows, but they can no longer be ignored, and they're not going away any time soon.
---