TV Talk: Adult animated comedy ‘Archer’ begins final season

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

In the streaming era where almost every conceivable genre, including adult animation, is in abundance, it’s easy to forget how much rarer adult-targeted animated comedies were before Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman” (2014-20) and “Big Mouth” (2017-present) or Adult Swim’s “Rick & Morty” (2013-present) and Hulu’s “Solar Opposites” (2020-present).

Credit FX spy spoof “Archer” (10 p.m. Wednesday, FXX; next day on Hulu), which premiered in 2009, and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim for bridging the divide between Fox’s Sunday night animation (“The Simpsons,” “Family Guy”) and the more adult, TV-MA-rated and creatively vulgar animated comedies now found on streaming.

Set in an American spy agency, “Archer” follows Sterling Archer (voice of H. Jon Benjamin) and his co-workers on missions assigned by agency head Malory (Jessica Walter), Sterling’s mother.

After 14 seasons, “Archer” bows out with the first of eight new episodes airing weekly beginning Wednesday.

Unlike some adult animated comedies (think: “The Simpsons”) “Archer” creator Adam Reed and executive producer Matt Thompson were willing to change up the show, sometimes in dramatic fashion.

After the first few seasons, the showrunners went off in various season-long flights of fantasy, from “Archer: 1999” (season 10), set in outer space, to “Miami Vice” parody season “Archer Vice” (season five) and 1940s-set “Dreamland” (season 8).

With the 2021 death of actress Jessica Walter, “Archer” wrote out Malory and in the new season former agent Lana (Aisha Tyler) is now the agency’s boss with a mandate to make money while doing good. The show also introduces a new field agent, Zara Khan (Natalie Dew).

Embracing change surely helped keep “Archer” fresh through the years. And the show remains in top form in early episodes that skewer the notion of corporate transparency, which Lana attempts to embrace before a dead body is found in her office wall, and she acknowledges transparency may not work for a spy agency.

In the season premiere, the gang is on assignment in Europe, where Pam (Amber Nash) inadvertently beans an archduke.

“It’s not like violence against an archduke ever led to something bad,” Ray (Adam Reed) says.

One of the strengths of “Archer” has always been its voice cast, which includes Judy Greer (“Reboot”) as demented office assistant Cheryl/Carol and Chris Parnell (“Saturday Night Live”) as company man Cyril Figgis.

“I feel like the challenge for us as actors … is not to fall into the same vocal or comedic patterns that we’ve been using the whole time,” Tyler said during FX’s portion of the Television Critics Association winter 2015 press tour. “You don’t want to all of a sudden betray the character that you’ve built and that people fall in love with, but you also don’t want to be tricks-y. I always worry that I’m going to start to rely on the same tricks and turns and inflections that I’ve used for five seasons, which is why I loved ‘Archer: Vice’ so much because the characters were out of their element and different things were happening and the dynamic and the relationships were changing and that made me think differently about how Lana was relating to the other characters.”

For actor Lucky Yates, who voices gadget guy Kreiger, going against instinct often works well.

“They’ll have me play the opposite emotion of what it seems it’s written like, and a lot of times that is what nails it,” he said.

Animation also allows more opportunity for experimentation than live-action series that are in a rush to get enough filmed in a day to stay on schedule.

“You have more room to play than you would in a live-action show where you’ve got to hit a mark and you’ve got to line up and you’ve got a day to make,” Tyler said. “Most times, you can get in and out of (recording) your part of (each animated episode’s) script in an hour. So if you have an extra 15 or 20 minutes to (mess) around, we have the liberty to find stuff on the show that would be harder to find if you were trying to make a day and there were a lot of actors and lights and stuff.”