What Am I Not Watching: Archer, Season Three

After randomly happening upon a couple of episodes on Teletoon, I recently bought Seasons One and Two of Archer on DVD.  Created by Adam Reed (Sealab 2012, Frisky Dingo), the animated sitcom revolves around the exploits of Sterling Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), an arrogant, self-obsessed, James-Bond-type spy who works for an agency (ISIS) run by his mother, Mallory.  Set in some sort of alternate time-line where the Cold War is still going on, the KGB is still active, but characters enjoy some of the amenities of 2012 (e.g., cell phones).

The show is populated by quirky, dysfunctional characters who have no qualms about being absolutely yet comically nasty to one another, either through words or actions.  While its main theme is a send-up of 60's-era spy movies, it works equally well as a workplace comedy, by featuring dysfunctional workplace relationships and romances and lampooning overly-touchy/feely anti-harassment policies as well as deflating the over-inflated sense of self-importance of standard HR/Finance/Accounting types.

Archer is a consistently cleverly written program.  The show brilliantly spoofs some stock Bond-esque spy stories and scenes, without falling into the broad, facile humour of typical attempts at spy-based comedies (e.g., Austin Powers).  The authors have created deep, well-defined and rounded characters with back-stories and personalities that clearly have been mapped out.  Season One laid down the particulars of the story and the main characters particularly adeptly.  Season Two grows the secondary characters while adding to the back-story and depth of the principals.  In particular, there is two-part episode in Season Two where one of the principals gets diagnosed with breast cancer and goes through a gamut of contradictory emotions and reactions.  The animated character shows more depth and humanity than most live ones on other TV shows.

Season Three debuted on FX in the States in January.  Good news for Archer fans, right?  Wrong.  It is not being carried in Canada.  While Teletoon seems to again be carrying the show overnight from Sunday to Monday at 12:30 AM (although their website brilliantly indicates it is on at midnight), it is once again simply showing random episodes from the first two seasons in no particular order.  As for the new season, Teletoon responded to my querries with ‘Archer is currently taking a short break from our schedule but new episodes will be returning in the Spring. Feel free to continue checking our website for any updates or changes.’  I guess a program like Archer does not fit within its mission statement of endlessly showing ancient episodes of Robot Chicken, Futurama, South Park and the like.  I had about the same luck with FX Canada: ‘At this time, Archer is not confirmed on our program schedule, check back to the FX Canada website for further program and schedule updates.’  The series could easily fit on the Comedy Channel, or even Space, never mind any of the other bevy of rerun-spewing channels for which Rogers charges me a mint.

If this sounds familiar, it is the same treatment afforded to The Venture Brothers, which was virtually impossible to find on the air in Canada, or The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which suffered from the same utter Teletoon episode scheduling randomness that plagues Archer.  This is a small sample size of course, but why are smartly-written animated series, which are definitely hits in the US being ignored in Canada?  Are our networks that risk-averse?  Or is there so much concentration in the ownership of our specialty channels between Astral Media, CHUM, Shaw and the like, leading to fairly uniform programming decisions?

In any event, as some of us frustratingly await maybe getting the privilege of watching what US Archer fans have already seen, or eventually buying Season Three on DVD (which might actually be quicker), here are some totally random lines from Season Two, which might give you a flavour of the show's humour (but are probably so out of context that they will only serve the purpose of making me laugh at them again.  Hey, it's my blog...):

‘Hello razor.  Welcome to the party.’  (Sterling Archer; Swiss Miss, after covering up his crotch with a shaving kit to defend against the 16-year-old he’s hired to protect trying to jump his ‘wilhelm’.

 
‘You can (control a person’s heart) with a little something I like to call a deep-cycle marine battery.  Or LSD.’  Krieger; A Going Concern.)

‘There’s not enough liquor and therapy in the world to undo that.  Argh, I touched my mother’s dildo.’  (Sterling Archer; A Going Concern.)
 
‘Sometimes I think, you know, I’d like to adopt a little baby.   So I could abandon it at a mall.’  (Cheryl; Blood Test.)
 
‘It’s a baby shower for the bastard child you humped into a filthy whore.’  (Mallory Archer; Blood Test.)
 
‘Five grams of junk says I can shoot that piña colada off your wife’s head.’  (Woodhouse; Blood Test.)