So Long, ‘Archer’ — Season 14 to Be the End of the Agency
After spending the latter half of the series experimenting with different styles and genres, the beloved FX animated spy comedy Archer is trying something it hasn’t done before — saying goodbye. Earlier today, FX officially announced that Archer Season 14, set to debut with a double episode on August 30th, will be the last installment of the spy saga.
The H. Jon Benjamin-led series has seen drastic changes from its beginnings as a James Bond/Man from U.N.C.L.E. parody, and many early fans who haven’t kept up since Archer first infiltrated the zeitgeist in the early 2010s might not fully recognize the agency-formerly-known-as-ISIS in its current state. When a certain other international violence organization stole the catchy acronym from Malory Archer’s spy agency, creator and executive producer Adam Reed took the show off-road, dissolving ISIS and reimagining the “mission of the week” formula that he felt weighed down the series as a by-the-books spy parody.
For those of you who haven’t been following since Lana, Cyril, Pam and the rest of “The Agency” stopped doing “phrasing,” Reed has continuously reinvented Archer in every successive season, careening between genre parodies of 1980s outlaw movies and detective noirs along the way. When Jessica Walter, voice actress for the aforementioned matriarch Malory, suddenly passed away in 2021, many fans wondered how long Archer could survive without its Oedipal powerhouse. It did, but the character was retired in the Season 12 finale.
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Now, as the show heads into its final and 14th season, the newly exonerated central cast of characters has returned to their roots and opened another independent spy agency with Lana Kane at the helm, and as the series sets to bring closure to these beloved characters after a decade-and-a-half of missions, jobs, schemes, plans and plots, all I can say is — danger zone.
