How TV’s Raunchiest Adult Animated Show Destroyed Itself

By TeeJay Small
| Published 1 minute ago

If you’re a fan of adult animated shows, you’ve almost certainly spent your fair share of hours cackling at FX’s Archer. The series, which premiered in 2009, centers on a team of bumbling spies, who take on missions in between drunken benders, one-night stands, and more quick-witted jokes than your brain can process on a single viewing. At one point in time, I would have considered Archer to be one of the best shows on television. Unfortunately, after airing for 14 seasons, the show lost a lot of magic, and ultimately fizzled out with an underwhelming finale.

Many fans have different opinions on when Archer peaked. Some say that the show fell off in season five, after pivoting from a fairly straightforward raunchy spy show into a vaguely defined crime adventure. Others stopped watching in season eight, when the title character is shot and sent into a multi-season coma. Personally, I find it difficult to pinpoint when the show started going downhill, though a lot of the blame rests on real world events outside of the narrative.

Archer’s Isis Problem

The first four seasons of Archer maintained a thin veneer of continuity, with a few running gags in place to reward binge viewing and eagle-eyed fans. For the most part though, the series was episodic in nature, allowing you to throw any episode on the TV while channel surfing with reckless abandon. Right when the series began to reach mainstream success, the writers had to make a hard pivot. This is because the spy agency in the show is called Isis, which you may recognize as a real-life global terrorism outfit. ISIS wasn’t exactly making headlines in 2009, but as Archer carried on, the group became one of the most talked-about insurgencies, which makes for some really awkward dialogue on a rewatch.

In season five, Archer drops the pretext of the Isis spy agency, and the main cast of characters take up work as mercenaries for the CIA. In doing so, the show takes a hard pivot into serialization, meaning you’d basically have to watch every episode in sequential order to know what’s going on. The jokes still work, the characters are still as chaotic as ever, but some of the magic of Archer’s hyper fast-paced writing is lost in the shuffle. Fast forward to the conclusion of Archer season seven, when Sterling Archer is shot and left for dead, and you have the dreaded coma seasons to look forward to.

Explaining The Coma Seasons

I can’t exactly prove this, but I’m given to think that series creator and showrunner Adam Reed wanted to quit the show and branch out into other stories around season seven of Archer. But, since the series had become such a cash cow for the network, FX insisted on renewing it, even if it meant delivering less cohesive material. The coma seasons aren’t unwatchable- they’d even be considered great in comparison to a lesser show- but they’re distinctly not the Archer that fans know and love. Each of the three coma seasons completely reframe the core cast, as they take on new roles as Neo-noir detectives, island refugees, and even space marines.

My theory about Adam Reed seems to prove true when you consider that he ultimately left the show after a very sloppy season ten. In doing so, Reed enabled new management to wake Sterling Archer up out of his coma, and attempt to return to the status quo. Even though I’m not a fan of the coma seasons, this is where the show goes completely off the rails for me. With the loss of Reed’s acerbic wit and the realization that three seasons of material effectively disappeared into thin air, season 11 feels like a cheap imitation of early Archer.

The Death Of Jessica Walter

Even if you’re an Archer super-fan, you’d have to admit that the death blow for the series came in 2021, when Jessica Walter passed away. Walter voiced Sterling’s mother Malory, and offered a stand-out performance that left the show hollow in her absence. The writers managed to use some archival voice lines to give her character a graceful exit in the season 12 finale, though FX made the baffling decision to prop up the corpse of this series for two more seasons afterward.

Seasons 13 and 14 of Archer have moments of joy, and a few solid laughs, but the show never manages to recover its spark once the Archer family matriarch is out of the picture. FX unceremoniously cancelled the series in 2023, and delivered a three-part special finale in order to placate long-time viewers.

What Might Have Been

The writers did their best to tie up all the loose ends, and I still enjoyed powering through to the very end of the show. Still, once the credits rolled, I couldn’t help but wonder what the television landscape would have looked like if Adam Reed had just taken his talents to a new show, rather than fundamentally changing so much of what made Archer great.

All 14 seasons of Archer are currently streaming on Hulu. If you’ve never seen the show, it’s still well worth the watch, just as long as you manage your expectations going in.

ARCHER FINALE REVIEW SCORE