That Old, Familiar Charm

No, you are not seeing things. You didn’t somehow miss a revival of the 2009 to 2023 FX animated series, Archer. That series went fourteen seasons, but despite watching my way through all of them over time, I only ever wrote reviews for the last three seasons (and closing mini-series) that capped the run. That’s eleven seasons of a show I really rather enjoy that never got coverage on my site. It felt like a massive gap in coverage, something that I knew, sooner or later, I was going to have to correct.

And so here we are. Sitting around, looking for something that I could watch while I waited for new episodes of other shows to debut, I was reminded, quite helpfully by HuluOriginally created as a joint streaming service between the major U.S. broadcast networks, Hulu has grown to be a solid alternative to the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime, even as it learns harder on its collection of shows from Fox and FX since Disney purchased a majority stake in the service., that Archer is a show I like and that all the seasons of the show are online for my perusal. As such, I felt it was high time to go in and finally do my deep dive of those first eleven seasons and give the series what it so richly deserved. But before we can get into the main meat of the series we first have to address the pilot episode, the one that started it all, “Mole Hunt”.

FX originally commissioned a six-episode premiere for the series, wanting to pair the show with the fifth season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Production constraints for the series, though, forced the network to push back the debut of the season, which eventually grew to a full ten episodes (six debuting from January through February of 2010, with a back three coming in March of that year), but the first episode was still up and ready to go for its originally scheduled September release. FX slyly did a stealth release, putting the show out on September 17, 2009, just to see how it did and, yeah, it was a huge success.

It’s not hard to see why. While the show would shift subtly over the course of its run, even here in its earliest form it’s still a biting and hilarious secret agent satire. H. Jon Benjamin voices Sterling Archer, super-spy extraordinary (as he likes to tell everyone he meets), and one of the top agents (at least, so he thinks) at the international espionage agency ISIS, which is run by his mother, Mallory Archer (Jessica Walter). Archer is joined in his super-spy antics by legitimately excellent agent Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), and the office is further supported by HR representative Pam (Amber Nash), accountant Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell), and secretary Cheryl (Judy Greer).

What makes this first episode, and the eventual season to follow, so special is that it has a very dirty, very raunchy, go-for-broke attitude about its storytelling. Archer is not a good guy. In fact, it’s fair to say that he is nothing but pure instinct and id. He drinks, womanizes, and gets into nothing but trouble, mostly on the company dime. As we see in this pilot episode, Archer has managed to rack up such a debt within the agency taking personal trips to exotic locations, saying at the fanciest hotels, hiring the most expensive hookers, and gambling away just so much money, all without it being legitimate expenses for any case that he’s working. If he wants it, he does it, he buys it, he owns it. He’s nothing but an alcoholic taker.

Honestly, I’ve seen people make the comparison between him and James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time., and the comparison is apt. Sterling Archer is who you would have if you took James Bond and tried to put him into the real world. He’s an asshole, through and through, and he doesn’t really care all that much about it one way or the other. He’s just floating through life until a worthy case comes along… and even then he’ll drink and screw his way through it until, we assume, everything works out well in the end. You know, just like James Bond.

This first episode implies a lot of that, but what it mostly does is focus on just how terrible of a person Sterling really is. Which is why it’s interesting that it also, somehow, manages to sell him to you as someone you want to hang around. Despite him being this asshole, he’s kind of lovable. I think a lot of that comes from H. Jon Benjamin’s delivery. Sterling says some absolutely awful things in “Mole Hunt”, but it’s said with the deep tones, comedic timing, and sarcastic delivery of Benjamin. He can both be a person you hate and someone you kind of love all at the same time, and this first episode knows how to sell that to you and make you want more.

Not that there’s a bad voice actor in the cast for this first episode (or beyond, although we’ll get to that). Along with Benjamin we have Jessica Walter, who proved to be the meanest, most biting mother possible over on Arrested Development, and she gives just as good a delivery (if not better) here on Archer. The dynamic between the two characters fuels this episode, as well as many to come, and as we saw in season thirteen, you really feel it when she’s no longer there for Sterling to bounce off of. Plus, the whole cast is a who’s who of comedians that really nail their characters and their lines. Not a bad actor in the bunch.

It’s interesting, though, to also see what elements would eventually fade away as the series went on. There’s the man guarding the dry cleaners that acts as the front for ISIS’s offices, and while Sterling gets a funny, awful joke in his interchange with the guy, I can’t actually find many details on the character like his name, his voice actor, or more. He eventually disappears, and then the whole dry cleaning front is dropped as well. Similarly, there’s an unvoiced secretary at the front offices of ISIS, and I know she disappears eventually too. At the same time, Krieger, who is essential to the show in its later seasons, doesn’t appear here (he’s just referenced).

Meanwhile, you can see how some characters change and evolve over time. Cheryl isn’t as crazy here as she would become in later seasons (you could consider it a flanderization, if you wanted, but she does get more hilarious as the series goes on), and she also seems to just be a poor, working stiff as opposed to a rich heiress (which is who she really is). Pam, meanwhile, is nothing like the tough as nails, street-fighting character we eventually see in later seasons. Here she’s meek, weak, kind of soft. Her being the HR rep here makes sense, and doesn’t align with her nearly as well as the series went on.

These are all, of course, growing pains for a show that was still finding its footing. In a series that goes on long enough details change and concepts shift. The show as it was envisioned in the first season, a send-up of the James Bond type, would eventually evolve into something more. Broader and far more interesting as the series continued. But it’s still funny and interesting here. It just has a small scope and a smaller perspective that it’s playing with, which is good. The show wisely was designed to manage itself well in its first season as it moved beyond the pilot and if and when it got to tackle more, it had the bones in place to follow itself through whatever narrative twists and turns it wanted to take.

“Mole Hunt” is a solid episode that does what it needs to do. It establishes its world, its humor, and most importantly its characters. It gave us one of the great vocal performances from H. Jon Benjamin (seriously, he was nominated for an Emmy for just this one episode alone) while promising so many more great adventures to come. While its raunchy humor might not have been for everyone (seriously, this show is really quite crude and awful at times), for a certain audience (myself included) it really hit. And then it would go on for many more episodes to come…