Stars H. Jon Benjamin, Aisha Tyler, Chris Parnell, and Amber Nash share their thoughts on 14 seasons of bungling, naughty spycrafting as the hugely popular, Emmy Award-winning adult comedy concludes its series run with a special 1-hour finale, ‘Archer: Into the Cold,’ debuting December 17 on FX and FXX, streaming the next day on Hulu.
All good things, sooner or later, come to an end. Or so I’m told. Since we first reported FX’s order for a six-episode, half-hour animated comedy, with the working title Archer, I’ve been an unabashed fan. Annual interviews with creator Adam Reed became a welcome ritual, me complementing his unabashed love of both obscure references and good old fashioned nasty humor while poking him for a taste of highlights he could share for the upcoming season.
The Emmy Award-winning show’s calling card has always been a relentless, unsparing approach to pushing its dysfunctional workplace ensemble comedy in directions that would make a “longshoreman blush,” as Reed often said. But nothing was ever played just for yucks. Archer debuted on FX in 2009; the series sadly concludes with an epic, 1-hour finale, “Archer: Into the Cold,” simulcast December 17 on FX and FXX, streaming the next day on Hulu. In the special, with the UN voting to outlaw independent spy agencies, Archer and the gang have to work outside the law to save the world from an unlikely duo.
Created by Reed, Archer is executive produced by Reed and his production partner Matt Thompson - who’d already given the animated world two previous gems, Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo – along with Casey Willis. The show is co-executive produced by Mark Ganek at Floyd County Productions and produced by FX Productions.
Archer, which boasts one of animation’s greatest ensemble casts, features the voices of H. Jon Benjamin as the world’s greatest spy, “Sterling Archer;” Aisha Tyler as the spy with marital troubles, “Lana Kane;” Judy Greer as the crazy office assistant in search of a special skill, “Cheryl/Carol Tunt;” Chris Parnell as the reliable company-man, “Cyril Figgis;” Amber Nash as the enthusiastic offender, “Pam Poovey;” Reed as the opportunist, “Ray Gillette;” and Lucky Yates as the experimenter-in-chief, “Algernop Krieger.” Jessica Walter, who sadly passed away in 2021, voiced the key role of Malory Archer, Sterling’s mother, an acerbic, biting, and wonderfully strident spymaster who owned and ran the agency. Season 14 also features Natalie Dew as the gang’s new super-agent, “Zara Khan.”
Though the show’s visual design, an interesting, seemingly simple 2D style integrating expertly composited digital puppets with environments first created in 3D before rendering as 2D images and pulled into Photoshop, became more and more sophisticated over the years, employing various digital tools to handle the growing number of action sequences and more elaborate lighting, Archer’s charm has always stemmed in part from its minimalist, colorful, and sleek presentation.
But let’s face it, no visual can steal a scene from Sterling Archer and Lana Kane, locked in yet another ridiculous screaming match, back and forth, admonishing drunken mission planning (or lack thereof), overly big hands, or the not-in-hell chance of a blowjob.
“I think, in a weird way, Sterling Archer is one of the most hateable characters ever presented,” Benjamin shares. “I mean, I know it's a cartoon, but he’s an awful person. But early on, very real relationships were established. And that, in a way, is what made the show great. It wasn't a complete throwaway, a delivery device for jokes. The characters had real depth. The mother-son relationship was central to the show, and those family dynamics were always lurking in the background, being explored. They gave the show a lot of dimension. So, in a weird way, I think he's a really awful person, but you could glean that he’s a product of some terrible circumstances, even though on the surface it's a funny spy spoof.”
Tyler adds, “I remember seeing illustrations of the characters, before we actually started making the show, and they were so beautiful, they felt so different from all the other animation we’d seen before with drawings that were really interesting, or disruptive, but not gleaming and sophisticated. And then the writing, it was just second to none. It felt startling and shocking and incisive and intelligent. And that intelligence, that combination of dirty and funny and smart, it captivated people in a different way than other animation they had watched before. It doesn't feel like disposable art, it really feels like art. But at the same time, it's one of the dirtiest shows on television. Adam Reed and I used to call it smart and filthy… the Smilthy Show!”
“But I didn't think the show was going to be a go,” she continues. “I’ve told the story a million times, but as I read the first script, I thought, it was so smart and so funny, there's just no way this show is going to get on the air. It's just too intelligent. It's too funny. Not that I'm jaded, you know what I mean? But sometimes you are like, ‘This is just too good for this world. This beautiful baby will not survive out there in the cold.’ And so, I didn't think it was going to make it, certainly as long as it has.”
“I’m not even sure I read the script before I went in,” Benjamin admits when discussing his early impressions of work on the show. “That was a bad habit I picked up from doing previous animated shows, which a lot of were either fully or semi-improvised. I didn't even look at the scripts beforehand. There were always scripts, let's say, for Home Movies, but I'd never read them because we would read them cold and then improvise a lot. So Archer was the first show I realized where reading the scripts was integral to the process because I had been doing it differently for so many years. I was very impressed by the pilot script. It wasn't until after that I found out that the creators of the show, Adam [Reed] and Matt [Thompson] were big fans of Coach McGurk from Home Movies and really wanted to reform that character. So that made me comfortable right away.”
Nash too was skeptical of the show’s future. “I remember in the beginning we were all like, ‘This show's going to get two seasons max and we're out of here.’ And I think it's a credit to FX that they gave us the time to really develop it and make it become what it has. Okay, we're doing this. This is going to stick around for a while.”
“I didn't think it would last,” Parnall chimes in. “No, not at all. You never imagine that you're going to have more than a few episodes. You don't even know if you're going to have a whole season. It looked like we were going to, but the idea of trying to project into the future and seeing where it might go or what Adam was planning to do with it, I had no clue. I was just happy to be a part of it and happy that it was a part that felt very much in my wheelhouse.”
“The thing that grabbed people the most, and the thing that I'm most proud of is, that while the show at first blush is raunchy, it's also very smart, and we are only able to do the raunchy stuff because the writing is so smart,” says Nash. “Just about every episode that I would get, particularly from Adam, I would have to look up something because I'd be like, ‘What the hell is this? Who is this person he is talking about?’”
Reflecting on her character’s humble origins, Nash notes, “I don't think that Pam was created to be much of a character. At the time, I think she was just going to be the butt of the joke. And then Adam was like, ‘Wait a minute, this character has a lot of potential.’ And slowly but surely, he kept giving Pam more things to do and it worked every time until she finally had this list of skills that was so insane and incredible. I went back and I read the pilot episode. And when Pam is introduced, it says, ‘Pam, the mousey director of HR,’ which is, to see where she ended up, couldn't have been more different.”
For Parnell, his work voicing Figgis leaned into the great material he had to work with. “Well, in the beginning, it was Adam's writing and the cast and the look. They created such a great look with the animation. And the writing was so good that for me, it was just about tapping into the most insecure parts of myself, the unrealized parts of myself, the feeling of smallness and being put upon. For better or for worse, it wasn't hard to be in touch with that. When you can trust the writing to take you in the right place, you just try to inhabit it. It's really just acting at the end of the day. You try to be present in the room where you're recording, but you try to be present in your mind with the scenario of who you're talking to.”
Since its first episode, the series has stretched the definition of “naughty,” filled with dysfunctional takes on situations like a combative office environment, workplace harassment, drinking on the job, and sex on the job, mixed in with an odd assortment of undercover missions that always went south. With lots of people screaming at each other. And did I mention drinking?
I can still remember my jaw dropping in disbelief at a Season 1 Sterling Archer line, one of countless watched over the years that makes you swear you’ll share with no one that it was the funniest thing you’d ever heard. Quizzed about its brilliance, Reed said rather begrudgingly, “For better or worse, I think I’ll be forever known as the person who came up with ‘the Pelé of anal.’” Yes, he will.
Asked if there were ever instances when it was time to record and they wondered, “I don't know how I'm going to get that line out?” Tyler replies, “Oh God, no. I’m a fan of comedy. I'll do anything. I'll say anything. For us, it was just about, can we make it funny? I was never offended. I always felt like the soul of the show was ribaldry. It was really about exploring the edges of... we were inappropriate, but we were never cruel. I always felt like the characters made as much fun of themselves as they did of other people. It never felt mean.”
“Not a lot, because I come from comedy,” Nash adds. “But the one that really, I was just like, ‘Oh my God, are we going to be able to say this?’ was, “Masturbate until my fingers bleed.’ I was just like, ‘Good God.’ But, having come up as a woman in comedy, I was often the only gal in a room with a group of dudes, so I was always dealing with that horseshit. And I think that's how Pam related to the rest of the group too. She's this little kid sister to everybody who doesn't let anybody get away with any shit. So outside of my acting, I think that's just who I was. I was already prepared for that personally.”
For Benjamin, he admits there were times he wondered if something would survive the edit. “There's no way that's getting on the air,” he’d say to himself. “Do you want a backup; do you want to change that line?’ But good for Adam and Matt. They were always like, ‘We will get it on.’ There were definitely moments in specific jokes where I'd be like, ‘This is impossible.’ But that was Archer. It worked. So, in a way, I was never surprised. I put my head down and read the lines.”
“When you come out of drama school and then The Groundlings and Saturday Night Live, there's not much that really shocks you,” Parnell notes. “It's just like, ‘Whatever.’ It's all game. So yeah, there were certainly lines… I'm not going to remember many specifics, but I guess Pam, her first times uttering, ‘Sploosh,’ was a bit of a shocker.”
Though the show centered mostly around Sterling Archer and his ongoing ability to make every difficult situation much, much worse, his relationship with Malory, his mom and boss, provided the critical foundation for how and why each member of the team behaved the way they did. And drank. Her death at age 80 in March 2021 was a huge loss. For the talented, award-winning dramatic actress known for playing the psychotic DJ stalking Clint Eastwood in Play Misty for Me as well as Lucille Bluth on the brilliant TV comedy, Arrested Development, her portrayal of Malory, with her snarky one-liners, searing side-eye, and bizarre approach to parenting, quickly made her one of animation’s all-time favorite characters.
“It was a real loss for the show and a real loss for the cast,” Nash says. “We were lucky enough to get to speak with her not long before she passed. She was such a big part of our group. She definitely kept us in line, [as at live events] we would get very out of hand. Being so classy and such a great example of what professionalism looks like in our work, she really kept us grounded. We were so glad that we had so many years with her. She told us many times that she loved working with us. So, I'm just so grateful for the time that we had together.”
Parnell adds, “It was so sad when she passed away. We knew that it was coming. We did have the chance to talk to her shortly before she passed, which was very meaningful. I think everybody has their own great memories of working with her. I felt so lucky to work with somebody as brilliant as she was, both comedically and dramatically, who was such a professional in terms of the way she approached the work. She was the grand dame of the cast. Everybody loved her.”
“Yeah, it was really hard,” Benjamin shares. “I think it was hard for the show. She had such a powerful voice that's really good for voice acting. And she was such a central part of the show. It was really hard. But I think they pivoted well, I think in a weird way, to honor her. Part of that was because they had built up some real dynamics between the characters. They weaved the loss in subtly. So, the loss for the show in real life became the loss for the characters in the show.”
“Her loss was incredibly painful,” Tyler says. “She was just such a light and such a leader in our group. A Hollywood legend, so lovely. And so funny. She had this effortless hilarity about her. She would needle all of us. [For one episode] she was asking Adam and Matt, ‘What is teabagging? What does teabagging mean?’ She would often make them explain these horrible things to her in great detail, just to watch them squirm. She was just our rock. But I feel so much of her presence every day in the show, in my own life. She was so supportive. She was so kind. She was someone who really lit up a room but never felt like she was taking all the air. She just lifted everybody up around her. And so, while it's sad that she's gone, I feel so much joy, so much gratitude for having known her, for what she brought to the show, and for what she taught all of us about acting and about comedy. We were just so lucky to have her.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
