Day Drinking on the Job

As I noted in my review of the series premiere of Archer, “Mole Hunt”, the television series pretty quickly found a solid voice for itself. It was raunchy, it was rude, and it was also probably the best 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. parody you’d ever see. Sterling Archer is James Bond without any kind of self control and in the context of the series, which felt tailor made for him, it works so well. And if this was a review of a new series just starting out, I’d ask, “but could the series keep that momentum going through an entire season?” Of course we know the answer is yes, since the show went on for a full fourteen in its run.

But what’s interesting is seeing how the series finds its voice in this first season, going from a very funny show about an asshole, Sterling Archer, and the people that have to put up with him, into a tightly honed series with intricately laid out jokes, lines, and sight gags that all tie into and around each other. The first couple of episodes are good, but once the show finds a way to densely pack itself with so many layered jokes and call backs going in, on, and around each other, that’s when things really begin to sing. That’s when the show truly becomes Archer.

Although the show doesn’t really have a strong throughline, there is one plot thread that kind of counts as the season’s overall “arc”. When we’re introduced to the characters, Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is shown to have a very contentious relationship with his mother, Mallory Archer (Jessica Walter). In fairness, he has a contentious relationship with everyone on the ISIS team, from from his mother's personal assistant Cheryl (Judy Greer), to finance head Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell), ex-girlfriend and best agent at ISIS Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), HR director Pam Poovey (Amber Nash), and tech lead Krieger (Lucky Yates), but it’s his mother’s relationship specifically that defines the season.

As we learn, Mallory was distant and cruel to Sterling as he was growing up. SHe shipped him off to boarding school at an early age, and then was never there for holidays or special events. She also lied to him about who his father was, telling him that his dad was a fallen combat veteran when, in reality, she was so drunk during a one week span it could have been anyone, from another spy in her agency to a KGB agent, or even a drummer. There’s a lot of resentment and distrust between them, which explains why he acts the way he does, even though he really should know better. And it does all come to a head by the last episodes when the FSB (former KGB) tries to reprogram him into a double-agent to kill his own mother.

Of course, before we get there we have a lot of other shenanigans. Mostly there are missions that always seem to spin wildly out of control, with Archer and Lana somehow making it out by the skin of their teeth despite Archer doing everything the wrong way. He gets drunk, he sleeps around, he makes jokes and gets distracted. He has the skill to be a solid agent, like Lana, but instead of rising to the occasion, more often than not he brings everyone down to his level. Or maybe it’s just that Mallory hires people of a specific temperament, and they all just so happen to be as easily led astray as her own son.

There’s a lot of psychoanalysis you can do on the characters even in this first season. Or you can simply enjoy them for all their weird antics and the silly things they do and say. Like Cheryl who steadily gets crazier and crazier over the course of the season, revealing herself to be something of a sexual freak (and that comes from someone that really has no judgment when it comes to kinks, but for Cheryl, some judgment). Then there’s Krieger, who hasn’t even fully come into his own yet as a character this season (it will come with time) and still manages to steal every scene he’s in.

The largest turn around from this season for any character, though, is Pam. As noted in the series premiere, season one Pam feels like a very different character from where she’d end up later. Here she’s still fairly meek, a soft and kind-hearted person just looking for someone to love her. She gets out of her shell some when she develops a friendship with Cheryl, but she’s a far cry from where she’ll be later when she’s revealed to be an underground street fighter and all around bad ass. That woman isn’t here yet, and it’s still weird seeing her here and knowing where she’ll be later. It feels like two different characters.

The biggest evolution the show takes, though, is with its joke setups. In the first episode, and a couple after, the jokes are fairly standard. You get some witty banter, a bit of back and forth, all led along primarily by H. Jon Benjamin’s Emmy-nominated delivery. It works for a show named Archer, but the series is more of an ensemble and it had to find its footing. The first couple of episodes aren’t really indicative of where the show would go. It had the crude humor and deadpan delivery but not the layering of jokes.

That would come in by mid season. Then we have characters set up jokes in one scene immediately to hard cut over to a different set of characters continuing a line in a different context. Like Pam saying something about a “situation being difficult” in the context of paperwork, and then it cuts to Archer and Lana in a gun fight, discussing how their relationship was “difficult”. The jokes are set up better than what I described, but they work even better as the show snap-cuts back and forth between scenes, never letting a line delivery finish before it’s moved on to recontextualizing it in the following moment. It really makes everything pay off even better.

But then, I do rather enjoy how the show finds the characters as the season goes on. It’s pretty clear that the writers felt like they had to take the structure of the setup slowly, letting the season play out in a more traditional manner before starting to really layer everything together. It could have continued on as a more traditional workplace sitcom, as it was in its first couple of episodes, albeit one at a spy agency, but instead it pushed harder, finding a tighter flow that would be hard for most other shows to pull off.

I honestly liken it in a lot of ways to Arrested Development (which also shared actress Jessica Walter). That show, too, was known for its intricate setup of jokes and running gags that paid off more and more as the seasons went on. Archer already has that here, getting each of its freaky, weird, and silly characters and finding who they are so it can continue to set up jokes that pay off in the episode, in the season, and beyond. It’s masterfully made, and while it’s slower here in the first season, the bones of it can still be appreciated as the season finds its momentum.

All in all, Archer really had a good first season. It’s not as strong as later seasons would be, but then it also had a lot of work it had to do that later seasons benefitted from. This season has to establish the characters, the setting, the story, and start moving the pieces around so the audience could see how everything worked together. It does that well and manages to be very funny in the process. If it’s not as funny as later seasons, that’s only because it had to work harder to get there. It’s the pilot season and as far as pilots go, Archer: Season One is aces. But it will only get better from here.