Adam Reed's Verbal Vision
How can a comedy be
this good four seasons in? And when is it going to start going
downhill? I wasn't totally convinced by Archer in its first season –
namely by Adam Reed's writing, with its focus on
gross-out-body-function-and-freaky-sex jokes and deliberately
dumb-ass tone. As I wrote, I thought the stellar ensemble voice
acting was what sold the show. But in its second and third seasons it
got legs (that's a thing, right?), with dramatic, almost-emotional
seasonal arcs and character development for the protagonist. Granted
that the character development goes straight out the window – much
like Archer's fiancee at their wedding – for a return to status quo in subsequent episodes,
it nevertheless kept things more interesting than a standard
animated-or-otherwise sitcom without causing the show to completely
devolve into soap opera.
Season 4 largely gets
away from these developments, and while a break from the mock-drama
might be a smart idea, it also feels like a drop in ambition. Instead
of continuing to climb, the show has spent a season cruising. (I
think that's a mixed metaphor, but since I don't drive I'm not sure.)
It's also become even talkier, with exposition blathered out lazily
at the beginning of episodes and scenes– a running gag but not
necessarily a funny one. On the plus side, however, the dialogue is
better than ever, with Reed figuring out how to hone the
stupid-sarcastic tone into something memorable and at least as
irresistibly imitable as Buffyspeak, and the cast's timing as
brilliant as always. The dispersion of the innumerable-per-episode
“Shut ups” (and variants, though not many variants) is enchantingly different every season
and the cast seems to take personal pride in mastering this aspect of
Reed's verbal vision. Which is totally a thing.
Other than the drop in
drama, a few more complaints about this season: Barry and Katya
coming back and then doing almost nothing for the rest of the season
was too Chekhov's gun-y for me, although Katya's new impatience with
Barry is a promising dynamic. This is a universe, after all, where
humour is generated by the fact that every exchange, no matter how
trivial (and they're all trivial), is volleyed at top force, like a
Howard Hawks movie (His Girl Friday or The Big Sleep)
in which everyone is hyper-aware of their inarticulacy in an
overeducated-but-dumbed-down early 21st century.
Archer's Girls
Almost consequently,
it's also a universe in which women are allowed to be hard-edged
without undermining anyone's masculinity. Or rather, the entire show
is designed to undercut the ludicrous masculine ideal suggested by
the James Bond/Don Draper main character. Cartoons can do that, maybe
uniquely among media: take an outsider's stance and satirize the pop
culture they're a part of, including its gender stereotypes. That's
why it was a disappointing to see Archer showily rescuing Lana more
than once in the later episodes of the season, seemingly deemed
necessary to nudging them in a romantic direction. I'm not sure if
I'm more irritated as a feminist or as a fan who doesn't want to see
anything merely conventional creeping into this show's universe.
As the show's resident
oversexual/asexual loonies, Pam and Cheryl don't have the problem
that befalls the main characters of comedy when the writers suddenly
have to make them romantically viable. They're also great from a
feminist perspective: again, the cartoon medium seems to allow Reed
to get away with creating female characters who are grotesque to a
degree that would be just too scary for a male viewer in a live
female comedian. (Unless, like Mimi on The Drew Carey Show,
the embodiment of female grotesquerie is their schtick.) Which
is groundbreaking for women in comedy even if it's a bit scary for
the female viewer to realize just how scary female characters can
seem if they're both “unfeminine” and non-objectified. (Lana is
still objectified, but so is Archer, so it's all good – a point
that Reed seemed to want to underline this season in an episode where
Archer gets his closed burned off while clinging to the roof of a car
in a chase scene which ends with him being flung, naked, onto the
hood of another car.) But in this comedic universe, it works to Pam
and Cheryl's advantage, because their female grotesquerie makes them
even harder core than the male characters.
Pam in particular seems
to be one of the writer's favourites. Last season we got to find out
that she was a sexual being despite her obsession with food and
excretion, and this season she joins the team as a field agent. On
the other hand, other regulars are lazily neglected. After regaining
the use of his legs (again), Ray has nothing to do for the rest of
the season except stand around looking disgruntled while the other characters insult him for being gay (which mainly consists of pointing out the fact that he's gay). (Reed seems to be experimenting this season
with political incorrectness for its own sake, not as a comment on
itself or anything else. It's annoying.) And after giving Ray bionic
legs (the second Chekhov's gun in the season), Dr. Krieger is
also basically left out of the rest of the episodes. As for Cyril, he
just gets to be permanently emasculated, and even Malory has little
to do this season. There are no great exchanges between her and
Archer – has Reed tired of exploiting their dynamic, the source of
such great tension (and even a tiny bit of stakes) in the previous
seasons? To be fair, it can't be easy writing for an
eight-man-and-woman band, but Reed seems to have got through this
season by picking his favourite characters and running with them.
Also, don't ever get Kristen Schaal on your show without giving her anything to do.
Just sayin'.
On the other hand, do
you want to know how well Archer passes the Bechdel Test? For
example, in the final episode Pam and Cheryl are shooting the breeze
in the always-abundant action downtime that always involves eating
and/or drinking, making absurdist speeches about siblings
relationships in the kitchen of a submarine, when Malory strolls in
searching for liquor with the query, “Eugh! Is this the infamous
Edie?”, which, however disdainful, does suggest that she's
well-versed in her employees' sibling stories. Jump to the helm,
where Cyril and Ray have had their faces smashed in by Archer's bad
and/or prankish driving but only get to make a couple of sarcastic
noises in response. It's as if the verbose Reed loves the aimless
chatter of women but can't think of anything for the men to talk
about except plot points (or, often, women – usually, Archer's
mother). Nobody likes anybody in this universe, but the women are
always up for a gab, whereas the men are more likely to sourly sulk,
in this season especially.
The season of course
ends with the revelation that Lana is pregnant. Not necessarily the
jumped shark itself, the pregnancy of one of the main characters
usually means that the writer(s) is/are running out of ideas and the
show is and/or should be winding up. Despite all of the
laugh-out-loud moments of Season 4 and Reed's perfection of the
show's dialogue, I'm almost hoping that Season 5 will be the last
season of Archer – and that Reed will pull it together after
the breather of Season 4 and finish things off with an inventive,
high-stakes bang.
But what's going to
happen with all of this romantic stuff? Will Reed continue to take
the lazy route of channeling Archer and Lana into more traditional
gender roles in order to bring them together, when their chemistry
was always a matter of their prickly parity? (One of the nice
progressive touches of the show that makes it feel very 21st
century is the way that women have to take as well as dish out
insults, including insults about their appearance, which Archer
levels at Lana all the time.) It's true that the kind of permanent
character development Archer would have to undergo to make their
relationship workable goes exactly counter to his type, the comedic
asshole (also seen in drama with Hugh Laurie's House), who can't
change very much without compromising the source of his appeal – or
80% of every episode's humour. (There aren't many female
counterparts, but Jennifer Saunders' similarly flighty, narcissistic,
substance-abusing Eddy on Absolutely Fabulous is a notable
one.) But if Archer has decided that it has to tie up loose ends by
shipping somebody, will Lana and Archer get together (to raise her
bastard child?) only for Katya, now sick of Barry, to reappear and
Archer to be forced into a choice? Jesus, I hope that's not it.
Nobody needs the series to turn into Archer's Girls. Although, that's
a badass idea for a cosmetics line.
It's worth noting that
Howard Hawks, in a comedy every bit of relentlessly cynical as
Archer, His Girl Friday, found a way to persuade the
audience that his couple belong together without making anyone change
or adopt more traditional gender roles. Is it another case of the
closer we come to actual gender parity, the harder time we have
fictionally representing it? Walter Burns doesn't have to, and never
would, make any gesture (let alone a suicidal self-sacrifice) to show
Hildy that he loves her; all of his actions throughout the movie
trying to manipulate her into staying have shown it, as he sort of
mutters at the end, and although she'd sort of love for him to make a
grand romantic gesture, she'd probably sort of hate it too. She has a
conventional idea of what love and romance should be that she has to
give up in order to accept the things she actually wants and the fact
that Burns is the only one who can give them to her. It's too bad
that, so far at least, Reed doesn't seem to take his own comedy
classic seriously enough to allow his characters to work out a
relationship that would make sense for them rather than imposing a
conventional idea of romance on them.
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