TV Review: Archer Season 8 (spoilers)

TV Review: Archer: Dreamland (spoilers)

The mantle of “Best animated show on TV” has obviously moved around over the past 30 years.  The Simpsons held the crown for about a decade, then came King of the Hill for a year or two.  South Park showed amazing staying power.  At some point the crown passed to the marvelously irreverent series Archer.  The show was both brilliant and stupid, sort of like its main character.  Sterling Archer was cut from the same cloth as Maxwell Smart, at times a brilliant super-spy, at other a dim-witted boob.  The vocal cast is amazing, the show became increasingly bold in its visual style, and like South Park there seemed to be no limit on how low the show would go for a chuckle.

Archer ended season 7 in an awkward place, namely the title character face down in a pool, profusely bleeding from a stomach wound.  But the show had been renewed for multiple seasons!  Where to go?  Creator Adam reed made a daring decision that showed how much he enjoyed reveling in clichés while mocking them: he reinvented the show as a fantasy in a comatose Archer’s mind, with the cast transported to a 1940’s film noir plot.

The resulting abbreviated eight-episode season was dubbed (appropriately) Dreamland. Archer was now a low-rent shamus seeking to avenge the death of his partner Woodhouse, who in reality had been Archer’s heroin-using manservant.  His mother was now an underworld boss named (again, appropriately) Mother.  Cyril Figgis, the office schlep, was now a police detective; Lana Kane, Archer’s partner both as a spy and as a parent, was a torch singer who was an undercover Treasury Agent; and oddest of all, HR director Pam Poovey was now a male bruiser cop just called Poovey. 

The premise showed promise at first.  The artwork had never been better, the cast was still the best vocal cast on TV, and the show had interesting touches, like having Archer suffer from PTSD flashbacks whenever he was in a fight with mobsters.  The re-imagined characters were both familiar and fresh, making the entire show seem new and improved.

I’m not sure where things went wrong, but they went wrong.  Nothing ever became of the PTSD flashbacks, the supposed plot of finding Woodhouse’s killer got endlessly sidetracked (although, to be fair, the show did meta shout outs on this fact regularly), and the show’s reliance on excessively graphic violence, only possible on an animated series, went over the op and became sadistic but not funny.  Archer’s closest relationships, with his mother and Lana, got attenuated and lacked the sharp give and take from previous seasons.

One doesn’t watch Archer for the reality, but there is a difference between being divorced from reality and reality having a 150 foot restraining order.  Archer’s resident demented genius, Krieger, turned a hood named Barry into a cyborg; okay, the same thing happened previously on the show, but what was fanciful in the 2000’s was downright silly in the 1940’s (even given that this is Archer’s subconscious fantasy).  The plot involving a nutso heiress (the always fabulous Judy Greer) went nowhere and distracted from the plot about the dozen or so Chinese sex slaves, which was for the best because that was the creepiest plot ever on Archer.

The real disappointment was the final episode, where no effort was made to go back and establish that this whole thing is going on in Archer’s imagination.  The violence was WAY over the top, with cyborg Barry being mauled to death by bionic Dobermans, then the Dobermans being gruesomely dispatched by the hulking assistant to Mother.  Lana was killed in an incredibly stupid manner to service a bad joke, and the solution to Woodhouse’s murder was just sort of tossed out there.

Archer (the series) has made some bold choices for season arcs.  I am still unsure what to make of the Archer: Vice season when the spy agency was turned into cocaine distributors (I read somewhere that series creator Adam Reed justified this by pointing out they were really BAD drug dealers).  

Reinventing the show as modern Hollywood detectives in season 7 was a mixed bag as well.

I don’t know what the future holds for Archer, but the show’s been renewed through season 10 by FXX, so it’s got a couple of more years to go.  Shows that take chances and don’t entirely succeed are infinitely better than shows that don’t try anything new and completely succeed.  As disappointed as I am in the conclusion of Archer: Dreamland, I am still eagerly awaiting season 9.