‘Archer’ Creator Adam Reed on the Hilarious Spy Show Coming to an End
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Adam Reed was searching for inspiration. He’d just sold his stake in the production company he co-founded, 70/30 Productions — responsible for his animated series Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo — and fled to Europe, to embark on what he calls a “pilgrimage.” One day during his expedition, he was idling at a café in Salamanca, Spain, and observed a group of stunning women. He wondered who could possibly have the courage to approach them. And then, all of a sudden, a suave fellow sat down at the table, ordered a bottle of white wine for everyone, and held court. And Sterling Archer was born.
“I was watching with my jaw hanging open,” Reed recalls.
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So, he formed a new production company with partner Matt Thompson, Atlanta-based Floyd County Productions, to develop a new animated series, Archer, centered on a profoundly narcissistic, idiotic, and effortlessly suave spy, Sterling Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), who does espionage for the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS, more on that name later), his mother Malory’s (the late Jessica Walter) spy agency. Set in the Cold War-era (sort of), and modeled after the ad agency in Mad Men, ISIS also employs Lana (Aisha Tyler), its most skilled agent; Cyril (Chris Parnell), a meek accountant turned field agent with a giant dick; Cheryl (Judy Greer), Malory’s bonkers assistant; Pam (Amber Nash), the head of HR and a champion bareknuckle boxer; Ray (Reed), a gay bomb expert; and Krieger (Lucky Yates), an unhinged scientist who sows chao and is probably a clone of Hitler.
“I was trying to write Archer as the biggest bastard I possibly could,” explains Reed. “Working on the pilot, I was reading all these Flashman books, and Harry Flashman is the worst guy in the world, but you still kind of root for him.”
What began as a mission-of-the-week show transformed into something more ambitious, as entire seasons took place in different eras and settings, starting with the Miami Vice-inspired fifth season of Archer Vice. And the Emmy-winning show is ending its 14-season run on Dec. 17 with Archer: Into the Cold, an epic three-part finale set in Rio de Janeiro and Sochi.
In honor of its conclusion, Rolling Stone spoke with Reed about all things Archer.
I wanted to start with the origin of Archer, which apparently happened on a trip to Spain.
I think it was born out of my unsuavity. I was on a pilgrimage in Salamanca and watched some guy who looked like what Archer would end up looking like just sort of glide in effortlessly and sit down at a table of beautiful Spanish women and order a bottle of white wine for everybody. I was watching with my jaw hanging open.
We never do learn the identity of Archer’s father throughout the show. Do you have any idea who that person is? Was it Rip Riley?
My vote would be for Buddy Rich. [Laughs] I was — and probably still am — quite bad about going down a path and forgetting that I had, and that was an example of it. I would get distracted by other things and forget to come back and tie up storylines and loose ends. Casey Willis was always really good about reminding me, “Hey… the thing you just said you want to do is impossible because you did this other thing.” I would try to bring back a villain and Casey would remind me, “OK, so… they died two years ago. Have they been reanimated?” And I’d be like, “Oh… forget that.” I think I’m a scatterbrained, sort of disorganized writer.
Is that why Barry Dylan kept coming back?
Casey would remind me what current state Barry was in appliance-wise, and how much human meat was still hanging off his metal bones. But I’m just so in love with Dave Willis’ voice. He’s so funny and adlibs so well, so we could never actually kill Barry — and if we did, we’d just reanimate him so we could have Dave come on the show.
Was there ever anything on Archer that was too wild for censors?
I don’t know about censors, but way, way back —in Season Two — the only time where FX said, “Hey, we’re not doing that,” was when I had written a script set at a ski resort [“Swiss Miss”] and Archer was being aggressively hit on by a young girl, who in the script was 14. I had googled, “Age of consent in Switzerland,” and it was actually 14, so I put that in the script. I said, “The age of consent is 14,” and someone from FX emailed me back saying, “That’s fine for that country, but the age of consent at FX is 18.” So, we had to bump her age up a little bit.
What was the thing that you’re most surprised you got away with?
You know, I would say that on balance, I can’t really remember anything else where FX said, “You have gone too far.” There were a number of cases where I wrote something and FX said, “Could you bump the edginess of this up ten or fifteen percent.” The reins were pretty loose.
Do you have any favorite Archer episodes?
I really like “Skytanic” and I just rewatched — and really like — some of the “Dreamland” season and “Danger Island.” I know those were quite polarizing for the fans, but they were very fun to write. And seeing Lucky Yates as that parrot cracks me up every time.
The episode where Archer believes he has breast cancer [“Placebo Effect”] and goes on a murderous rampage is a favorite of mine.
Oh yeah! Those were two back-to-back. I liked those. I love a good rampage! I have been mentally getting ready for these finales. The evenings over the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking back at some old episodes, and there are still, for me, some laugh-out-loud moments, and a surprising number of scenes that I have no memory of writing — which is probably not great, I don’t know! It’s nice to see how many great guest stars we’ve had over the years, and there are moments you can remember where everybody had to take a break during the VO session because everybody was laughing. It’s wonderful and bittersweet and sad to watch Jessica’s scenes. But it’s lovely to be able to watch her on television. Every once in a while, I’ll watch a random episode of Arrested Development to see her and check in on her. There aren’t many people in one’s life where you have access to video of them whenever you want it.
With Jessica Walter and Judy Greer, were you inspired to cast them in this by their characters in Arrested Development? Because the characters they play hew close to the ones in that show.
They do very much. Certainly, at the beginning, I had pitched it as “Arrested Development meets James Bond.” I didn’t want to stray too far from that at first, and then we found ourselves in new and strange territory with those characters. The main reason — if not the only reason — that Judy had agreed to be on the show was that Jessica had already said yes. We shamelessly splashed [Jessica’s] name to all the VO agents.
Do you have a favorite moment of Jessica voicing Malory Archer?
In that breast cancer episode, she and Archer sit up in her office getting drunk the night before his surgery, and that one really sticks with me. There were a couple of times when I was still directing the VO episodes where I had written something terribly off-color for Malory, and Jessica would say, “Just so I know how to read this line, what does this mean?” and I would have to explain to her some horrible Urban Dictionary slang, and she would go, “Oh, Adam!” and then nail the read. She was a very good sport.
When I hosted an Archer panel at Comic-Con a while back, Jessica said she could throw them back just like Malory. Did you ever get to have a boozy martini session with her?
I have had martinis with her, but she was always very squared away. I never, ever saw her even tipsy. She would have a martini, be the classiest lady you ever saw, and then bid everyone a fond farewell for the evening.
One of the craziest things to happen over the course of Archer’s run was to have to rename ISIS because of the terrorist organization.
That is crazy! FX gave me a heads-up, like, “We may need to change this.” And I said, “Why don’t we preemptively have FX sue the terrorist organization ISIS?” That was a non-starter, apparently. They were like, “Nope. Change the name.” My dad’s favorite baseball cap was the big ISIS logo [from Archer], and he goes and drinks coffee at a diner every morning with all these old guys, and he came to me one day and said, “Hey… I hope you don’t mind, but I can’t wear the cap anymore. I’m getting some dirty looks at the diner.” [Laughs] But you know, I spent too much time coming up with that name and thought it was very clever, and I never was happy with subsequent names for the agency. And, in addition to all the other bad stuff, I’m still pissed off at ISIS for that!
You had a lot of amazing guest stars on Archer, but one of my favorites was Anthony Bourdain. How did that happen?
It was fantastic. I can’t remember exactly how it came about! We would run into people at events, and if someone gave even the most minimal polite, “Oh yeah, I’m a fan of the show,” we would start hounding them to come be on the show. That’s probably what happened with him. He was a really, really good sport about the whole thing. He had a sense of humor about his perceived curmudgeonliness. His character was quite insult-y, and whatever I had written he, a lot of times in the script, was like, “Hey, could I say this instead?” And whatever insult he had in the quiver was a lot funnier and meaner than what I had written.
Archer Vice was probably the most divisive season of the show because it was such a departure from previous seasons. Looking back on that, how do you feel?
[They were] infuriated! I think that also coincided with the whole ISIS thing. Part of it was, I was feeling a little burned out. I thought Archer would be on for four seasons, so when they said, “Hey, let’s do another season!” I was like, “Oh, shit.” I talked to my agent about it and he was like, “That’s a terrible idea,” and I talked to FX about it and they were like, “That’s a terrible idea.” One of the first rules of TV is: if something’s working, don’t fix it. But I just thought it would be really fun.
When the show started, it was ninety percent Archer. And, as I was having more fun discovering these other characters, I wanted everyone on all the adventures because that was more fun to write. Krieger was never going to talk. He was just going to be this Lazlo from Real Genius character who just skulked around. We needed him to say one thing and asked Lucky to say it, and we were like, “Oh my god! That’s the voice that should have been coming out of this head.” Pam was going to be this tiny, tiny character mainly in flashbacks, and then Amber read that and we were like, “We can have these people in every episode. Why aren’t we doing that?!”
I know it was originally pitched as “Arrested Development meets James Bond,” but how much inspiration did it take from Mad Men? Because the office environment is very Mad Men and Archer does resemble Don Draper.
That was a huge part of it. Doing all the design work for the pilot, it was like, “Go watch Mad Men and make their office look like that!” We set the show intentionally out of time so we could pick furniture from this era, cars from this era, and still have cellphones because that’s so much easier as a writer than having someone find a phone booth.
We’ve talked about this in the past, but how close did an Archer movie with Jon Hamm get to coming to fruition and would that still be a possibility?
I don’t know! I never sat down and wrote one, and I don’t know if it ever got anywhere beyond talking about it and everyone talking about it saying, “That would be a great idea.”
What was it like splitting H. Jon Benjamin with Bob’s Burgers? Archer came first and it is a bit unique to have the same guy voicing two leads in two big animated shows at the same time.
There was an initial and very short-lived anxiety about it. We heard about it and were like, “Oh no! What are we going to do?!” And then we watched Bob’s and were like, “Oh man, that’s great.” From then on, I was just delighted to have both things in the universe to be able to watch. And I don’t know what it is, but Jon, to me, sounds like two pretty different characters — even though I don’t think he’s doing a voice for Archer and doing a voice for Bob. To me, they come across as two very distinct characters.
What are you plotting next?
Currently nothing, really! It’s amazing how my days are just packed with puttering around.
You’ve gotta take another trip to Europe for inspiration.
Another long walk might jog something loose!
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