Archer 3-12: Space Race Part 1

(This is either the ninth or the twelfth episode of the third season, based on where you place the three-parter that aired in the fall.  Wikipedia sayeth this is number twelve, so I'm going with that.)

So, how seriously are we supposed to take the plots in Archer?  Of course, this is a comedy that plays fast and loose with reality, history, and narrative sense, set in some strange mixture of the 1960s Cold War world and our present day.  The plots are usually obvious take-offs of spy movie conventions -- in this episode the Moonraker-esque space jaunt.  It's all supposed to be rather silly, but is it possible to say that an episode of Archer is poorly plotted?

Not that "Space Race", the first of a season-closing two-parter, is that poorly plotted episode.  For the most part it operates just fine, moving the main cast from one space-related set piece to another, and ends with a decent twist that was, like any good twist, in retrospect totally telegraphed from the last scene.  The implausibility of this all -- a group of secret agents being sent into space with a day's training -- is pretty much par for the course.

Despite this, there are moments when the strain of the Archer formula starts bogging down the show.  Discovering that Pam and Cheryl stowed on board is not really a surprise because, well, they've done that on pretty much every other far-flung adventure the spies have had, and the show needs to get the full cast up into space.  They're hilarious characters, but they don't really do anything in this episode to justify their presence beyond their usual weird-sex schtick, and I'm starting to worry that the show is relying too much on its breakout characters.  I mean, Pam is great, but there's a definite danger of her becoming the next Kenneth.

The episode as a whole feels kind of padded out.  This is always the danger of two-parters, the usual format for stories that don't quite fit into the standardized episode format but could probably be trimmed down to maybe an episode and a half.  This episode in particular is all first act, focusing on getting our characters up into space and setting up what should be a fun showdown with Astronaut Bryan Cranston's[1] band of space mutineers next week.  The jokes and plot beats all seemed sort of repetitive.  How many times do we have to see Lana vomiting after all?  Once is clever foreshadowing for the inevitable pregnancy reveal next episode, after the fifth time it's overkill.

And... I sound like a giant curmudgeon again, don't I?  Of course, Archer doesn't have to be relentlessly moving the plot forward, and some of the most fun moments are random tangents.  For people that are invested in goofing off with these characters, this episode was a lot of fun (see, for instance, Todd VanDerWerff's glowing review.  I don't want to rag on TVDW, who I usually like, but this review kind of reads like an account of a great party instead of a television show.  "And then those guys I love showed up, and we all sung Danger Zone together!")  I don't want to dismiss that pleasure -- as I've argued before, part of the sitcom tradition (which is at least a strand in Archer's DNA) is that it's an environment of virtual friends that you can easily step into every week.

But Archer is not, and never really has been, a hang-out show.  Even if the plots aren't usually the most interesting part of any given episode, they are there for a reason.  Most obviously, they provide a steady stream of new material for the episode's running gags to bounce off of.  So a lack of progression in plot leads to a lack of progression in jokes.

There are certainly one-liners in Archer, but pretty much every episode has a string of running jokes.  These jokes are developed over the course of the episode, put into new backdrops, permutated in strange ways, and finally taken to a ridiculous crescendo.  There's something of this here -- we have, for example, Archer spending most of the episode trying to get Drake to say "danger zone", one of his well-established pop-culture obsessions, but this only happens in the closing line of the episode.  Here the structure of the jokes mirror the structure of the storyline, with Drake's seeming ignorance being flipped around to reveal that he has always been in a savvy, superior position.  And it's a really fun treat for TV addicts.

Sometimes these jokes can be sustained and developed across multiple episodes or even the course of the series.  For example, in a previous episode Archer became addicted to sex with Pam (which is apparently mind-blowing), and one of these scenes included a paddle as an unremarked-upon background element, suggesting a kind of undefinably chaotic, slightly kinky, sexual whirlwind.  In "Space Race Part 1" the paddle returns as a kind of hilariously precarious zero-gravity modesty-saver.  It's an inspired bit, even if I am rather uncertain about Pam's presence in this episode.

However, the key to this structure is the progression, which this episode neglects too often.  One of the recurring lines here is "Read a book", always preceeded by an unlikely character lecturing another on some obscure academic point, a part of Archer's tendency towards out of place high-culture references.  This is funny the first couple times, but the same joke is just repeated too much without variation.  The same holds for Lana's above-mentioned vomiting, or any of the other recurring gags.

"Space Race Part 1" is far from being a bad episode of television -- there are a lot of genuinely funny parts, and nothing really unpleasant.  It basically takes the Archer cast and lets them play around in a more science-fictional setting than usual, and so for fans of these characters it's a treat.  But it's worth examining because it seems to reflect a kind of laziness that established series sometimes drift into, where it becomes merely enough to set your characters spinning, have them do their thing, and go home.  The Simpsons is probably the most visible and extended descent into this -- instead of more ambitious earlier episodes, the plots eventually descended into "The Simpsons go to X" or "deal with Y".

Obviously Archer isn't at that level, at least not yet, but this could be an early warning sign.  Or maybe it's just the kind of sub-par episode that every show turns out.  But it does make me a lot less sure that Adam Reed (pretty much the sole writing staff) knows the real strengths of his show, the more subtle structural strengths instead of wacky characters.

Next week: "I know what an analogy is.  It's a thought with another thought's hat on."

[1]I'm all about the Cranston, and he does a great job as the rogue commander here, being so trustworthy that the obvious betrayal seems genuinely surprising, but at the same time believable.  Still, he might be too good an actor to be a celebrity guest star.  I didn't realize that it was him until the end credits, and while looking back you can hear his distinctive cadence come through at points, there's never really a "Hey, it's that guy!" moment.  Which is good in its own way, but it's strangely subdued for a show that devoted a whole episode to "Hey, it's Burt Reynolds!" earlier this season.

(On the other hand, I can't imagine the voice of Bryan Cranston is a huge ratings draw, Emmys or not.)

Archer 3-02: Heart of Archness Part 2

(I'm getting conflicting info on whether this three-episode block is in fact the end of the second season of Archer or the beginning of the third.  Wikipedia says the latter, and it's always trustworthy, so that's what I decided to go with for the blog post header, but my OCD brain is probably going to lose sleep over this.  Details!)

A few weeks ago I talked about Frisky Dingo, an Adult Swim full-scale assault on the superhero genre.  Adam Reed's follow-up series to this was Archer, a series that does much the same thing for the equally iconic (and equally frequently parodied) spy genre.  Archer is, however, a bit more conventional -- it's the usual half-hour for comedy, is more episodic (although this episode is a bad example of that) and has a more common style of animation and comedy.  The animation is meant to be realistic, drawing off human models and 3-D techniques to an extent that resembles rotoscoping.  Truthfully, this style edges into the uncanny valley -- the characters look just real enough that their jerky or overly mechanical movements can  (This goes double for the assorted floozies Archer beds throughout the series, which have the same kind of pubescent awkwardness that attempts at 3D computer-generated porn have.)  In the end this creates a style which is no less disorienting than that of Frisky Dingo.

The comedy often strikes me as a spy-ified version of 30 Rock.  Instead of the Adult Swim-style awkward humour Archer prefers to throw as many jokes at the screen in a short time as possible, and grant that the audience is intelligent enough to catch at least most of them.  The broad range more or less ensures this -- this is a show which places in close proximity jokes about anal sex and ones about William S. Borroughs.  There's also a strong focus on workplace humour, with a lot of subplots dedicated to characters like Pam the HR head and Cheryl (or is it Carol?) the secretary having office-bound adventures.  At times it seems like the central joke of Archer is that in real life a James Bond-style spy agency would be run with just as much beauraucracy and office politics as any other job.  All of this makes it more in line with many modern comedies than the weirder style of humour favoured by Frisky Dingo.

At the same time there are clear continuities -- the megalomaniac, childish hero Archer and his long-suffering butler Jeeves are successors to Xander and Stan -- and it's certainly just as auteurist as the previous series, with Reed writing or co-writing every episode thus far as well as providing the voice of Gillette.  The general source of humour -- the collision of the fantastical with the mundane -- is also the same.  All of this can be taken to mean that Archer is not just a successor to Frisky Dingo but an improvement on it, using the same template to move towards a more perfect television show.

"Heart of Archness" is probably the most ambitious thing the series has attempted thus far.  It's a three-part serialized storyline placed in between seasons, almost a kind of split-up Archer: The Movie.  The show has used serial elements before, mostly in terms of the characters' relationships, but there was always an episodic structure that these elements were placed around.  Which isn't to say that there's no concern for the episode, as each of the three parts seems to form a distinct chunk: the first part was about Rip Riley hunting down Archer, this week is about Archer's fall from grace as the pirate king, and presumably next week will concern the spies' escape from the pirates' prison.  This is basically the conventional three-act structure, with each episode being given its own act.  The second act, usually the most interesting in any given film, is all about introducing complications to what we thought we learned from the first one.  It also usually ends with our hero(es) at the lowest point, with seemingly no hope, and this episode certainly fulfills those criteria.

Part 2, however, starts at the office.  I've mentioned the gap between the fantastic and the mundane as at the heart of Archer's humour, and these office scenes fully play off this clash.  The spy-focused characters -- Archer, Lana, Mallory -- are fundamentally viewing things through that lens, as basically an action movie, while the office characters treat it all as another job -- Carol doesn't want to work late, Pam just wants drinks after work, and Cyril is worried about how all of these adventures will affect the budget.  In a way this is a very clever satire on the action genre.  We all cheer when the boss proclaims that all resources will be devoted to the hero's mission, but Archer shows us the put-upon beauraucrat trying to find room in the budget for this largesse.  Essentially, there are two completely perpendicular world-views -- the managerial and the cinematic -- and no one in the series is able to see both.

This is what gets Archer in trouble with his new tribe of pirates.  In essence, he can't view the pirate clan as a business that needs money just as he doesn't notice the more mundane business-like elements of ISIS.  Archer, the quintessential man-child, only views life as a string of exciting attractions.  It's this myopia that gets him in trouble, but it's also what makes him an appealing comedy lead -- Archer becomes the one who does what we cannot and should not, id unleashed.  He usually comes into conflict with a stern, rules-abiding figure, the superego if we want to go fully Freudian.  Lana, Cyril, and his mother all fill this role at various points in the series, but in this episode it takes the form of David Cross's guest character Noah, a kidnapped anthropologist who acts as translator and middleman.  Curiously, the character is designed to resemble Cross himself, translating the idea of the familiar guest star (I'd bet there's a significant overlap between the audiences of Archer and Arrested Development) into a seemingly alien form.  Archer does this tie between character and actor a lot, further contributing to its sense of the uncanny.

Of course, the binary between id and superego isn't as clear-cut as that.  The office characters all seem to have their own barely-repressed but viciously hungry desires, from sex-addict Cyril to masochistic Carol to the hedonistic Pam.  As much as characters like Noah or Cyril may seem to be the sensible side of the equation, they're fighting a losing battle, as in Archer human desire is always crushing the superegotary attempts to destroy it.  The only difference is between those who try to resist this force and those who don't.  So it's no surprise that a thieving Cyril and a drunk Pam end up sleeping together instead of being the straight men they're supposed to be.  And it's also no surprise that underneath her dowdy HR-rep sweater Pam bears a giant back tattoo (revealed in an earlier episode but called back to here.)

(I apologize for that screenshot.  Really.)

Besides Archer's pirate adventures and the usual office debauchery we also have the C-plot of Ray and Lana trying to rescue Archer.  Of course, this is a bit of a Gilligan's plot as their rescue mission obviously can't be successful this episode, and they end up being caught fairly easily.  As a C-plot in a half hour show, we don't spend a lot of time with them, and what we do hangs upon the two central jokes of the characters: Lana's barely suppressed feelings for Archer, and Ray's stereotyped gay persona, now given hedonistic reign with an unlimited credit card.  Besides the obviously problematic natures of these jokes (Ray in particular has gone from a competent agent who happened to be gay to one shade short of Billy Crystal over the course of the series), these are also things we've seen before not just in this series but in countless other comedies.  Archer and Lana's love-hate relationship feels ported over from some other show without any of the usual Reed skewing, and is as familiar and basically uninteresting as any other sitcom romance.  These are two of the weaker characters on the show, and it shows when they're given nothing else to do but bounce off each other.

At the end, then, this middle of the three-parter is essentially more familiar than one would think.  The classic Archer formula is a mostly self-contained major action story, some chaos back at the office that is its own story while also fitting into a general arc like Cyril's downward spiral, and maybe some advancing of the characters' relationships in a serialized way.  There are plenty of shows (particularly comedies) that function just like this.  The major difference here that the episodic plotline stretches across three episodes, but in the end it'll probably be ultimately as self-contained as what comes before it.  Really, at this point the line between episodic and serialized television has become blurred, with most shows deciding to adopt a mixture of the two, and this is shown by how easily Archer pops over the line and back again.

There's nothing wrong with a show that's conventional, or episodic, or that broadly fits within the main storytelling modes of its time.  At the same time it's necessary to carve out your own identity even within the form you're using.  This is what Archer really succeeds at: what we see is familiar, but slightly off-kilter -- the definition of the uncanny.  At the same time there's a simple level of competence that elevates Archer above most of its contemporaries, delivering gags that are bpth unexpected and executed perfectly.  The traditional sitcom may be moribund, but Archer provides an example of how a comedy can be great without needing to innovate.

Next Week: Anatomy of a (bad) sitcom.