Few days are more sacred than the season premiere of Archer. Maybe Christmas. I assume Hanakkah, but I don’t want to speak on behalf of my Jewish friends. Thanksgiving has a few good things going for it. Most notably my homemade cranberry sauce with honey and rosemary – not that garbage from a can (I’m not a f’ing monster) – but as much as I love that cranberry sauce on a nice cut of turkey breast, it’s no match for Sterling Archer.
Archer’s 7th season begins tonight at 10pm and that means today, yes today, is the holiest of holies. (Are we not doing phrasing anymore?) Season 7 (codename: Archer P.I.) opens with a few drastic shifts in the show’s basic formula. But what would a new Archer season be without upheaval and reinvention. Change has been the status quo since Season 3. We’ve seen Adam Reed turn his show inside out and upside down as Archer & Co. has slipped in and out of the business of espionage in order to traffic drugs and “work” under the auspices of the C.I.A. Now Archer is a father, struggling with issues of mortality (despite apparent immortality) and easing back on some of his more self-destructive behavior for the good of Lana and her baby. As a result, the gang finds themselves in Los Angeles working as undercover investigators. Clearly, this is the safer profession.
The season’s opening sequence (which has already been released to the Interwebs) teases a tonal shift from the perpetual riff on James Bond to a more film noir-centric premise. Two detectives (voiced by J.K. Simmons and Keegan-Michael Key) discuss a dead body found floating in the pool. The body, of course, is Sterling Archer himself, doing his best impression of William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here about how or why Sterling Archer found himself face down and bleeding in a swimming pool. After all, we’ve only been given a taste, the tip, if you will, of the coming narrative. It’ll take a full season for this mystery to play out. In addition to spot-on noir gags, expect plenty of Magnum, P.I. references.
Though the show’s James Bond bent might have waned in order to make room for more Raymond Chandler allusions, Archer has gifted us a video review of a number of films starring 007 to pass the time until the premiere tonight. I couldn’t be happier that Archer gives plenty of airtime to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s bobsled chase, Scaramanga’s third nipple and T-Dalt’s “adorable chin dimple.”
Source: Entertainment Weekly