Archer’s got the sharp writing and comedic chops, but its nihilism makes watching it a bit of a psychological strain.
Archer is billed as a kind of James Bond meets Arrested Development – a sitcom about highly dysfunctional people inside of an organisation – a private intelligence outfit called ISIS – to whose nature they are uniquely ill-suited.
There’s Sterling Archer, the titular superspy whose natural talents at secret agent-ing are often stymied by his amorality, casual bigotry and mother issues. Equally bad is the boss of ISIS and Archer’s mother, Malory, who is essentially a facsimile of Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development infamy, except that here, her callous haughtiness and unhealthily controlling attitude towards her offspring are amped up to even more absurd heights.
The cast is rounded up by a bunch of other characters with their own odd quirks – Cyril, the seemingly staid ISIS comptroller and closet nymphomaniac, Cheryl, a useless secretary with some seriously weird sexual kinks, Pam, the HR director, whose sole purpose in the show seems to be a foil for a deluge of off-color jokes about her weight, and Lana, probably the most put-together of the bunch, an ISIS superspy who often serves as a foil to Archer’s idiocy.
When you put this many people and their dysfunctions in an office environment, especially if their professions happen to involve lots of high-tech gadgetry and lethal weaponry, utter bedlam ensues, and the jokes almost write themselves. The characters of Archer get themselves into every sort of unethical situation possible, through their venality, arrogance, incompetence, pomposity, or any combination of those traits. But it seems to happen in a world where such actions carry no consequences, either in an overarching plotline, or to the reputation of ISIS as an intelligence contractor. Indeed, the world itself is a bit ill-defined – a bag of historical and technological anachronisms – CRT monitors with cellphones, where the KGB still exists and the great superpower rival is still Russia.
But the thing about Archer is that after a while, with each successive episode being the same collection of sociopathic hijinks, without much in the way of character growth or development beyond their stock places in the comedic pantheon, the series starts to get a little tiresome. Archer may be compared to Arrested Development, but at least in the latter, the Bluth family, while plagued with their own issues, were still human and still sympathetic – and they truly cared for each other as a family. In Archer, the titular character is utterly and incorrigibly a twat, without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. An inveterate boorish womaniser, spendthrift, cavalier over human life, callous towards his peers, cruel to his servants, selfish to a fault, and plagued with a host of mommy issues – a walking bag of the worst superspy stereotypes, and then some. It’s hard to feel any sort of sympathy for anybody in Archer, since nobody in Archer seems to care about anything in particular except for their self-serving ends.
A show can only go so far on its endless variations of comedic dysfunctional hijinks involving its typecast characters, before it starts to get tiresome. And with Archer, because the jokes depend so much on the self-serving venality of its characters, the show verges into nihilism, but without anything substantive to say beyond its jokes.
I hope Archer grows a soul in later seasons – I won’t spoil myself by checking, but from the looks of the first few episodes of Season 2, I doubt it’ll do so for a while yet.
I give this show: 3/5 out of 5 whiskey glasses
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