Archer season 14 review: The best the show has been in years

No show in its 14th season on television should be as fast-moving, or as funny, as Archer, which kicks off its final batch of episodes August 30 on FXX. TV’s most beloved animated spy sitcom should be showing its age. (It has, in fact, shown its age for a couple of years at this point, even if it still consistently put out a couple of stellar episodes every single season.) Certainly, a show that’s been running for this long shouldn’t be able to just throw a brand new character into the mix, instantly revitalize its creative chemistry, and give every impression that it’s going to be going out on something that feels dangerously close to “on top,” right?

And yet.

Audiences checking in on Archer with this week’s two-part season premiere, “The Anglerfish Stratagem” and “30 For 30,” will find the show settling into the status quo set up in last season’s finale: Lana Kane is now everybody’s boss, Sterling Archer is still TV’s most charmingly rampaging asshole, and The Agency (or whatever we’re calling it now) is still getting dragged all over the planet by clients who never tell them the complete story about their missions. The difference now, though, is the client herself: British Interpol agent Zara Khan, played by Natalie Dew—who, despite her guest-star billing in each of the four episodes of Archer season 14 that FX made available to press ahead of the premiere, is the show’s new main cast member in all but name.

Archer has spent the last few seasons—basically, since its hero got out of that genre-flipping coma back in, Jesus, 2020—playing with the idea that Sterling Archer is a man past his prime. Zara, who recruits the team to help her bring down a ring of international thieves, and then gets swept up in the ensuing chaos, is basically that thesis given life: She’s a little faster, a little smarter, and even, somehow, a little more reckless than the world’s “most dangerous secret agent.” Or, to put it another way: After 14 seasons of ruining pretty much every mission his teammates drag him along on with his casual disregard for the safety of both himself and others, Archer has finally got an Archer of his own.

It works, for reasons both obvious and otherwise. The first, for instance, will be apparent to anyone who’s even briefly dropped in on Archer over the last few years: Despite the talents of this cast, and the general caliber of its writing, the show has needed something to shake up its character dynamics. Tossing a new boss like Kayvan Novak’s Fabian into the mix to smirk at everyone at the top of an episode wasn’t enough to get the show out of its basic “everyone tells Archer not to do something, he does it, shit explodes” rut. Making Zara his partner on missions, though, makes their dynamic an integral part of almost every episode, forcing the show away from the easy storytelling moves it’s reached for in the past.

More subtly: This show has always worked best when Sterling Archer is stuck on his backfoot. It’s why the series takes such glee in seeing him get shot, stabbed, beaten by robots, and more. As good as he is at sarcastic smirking, H. Jon Benjamin is a genius in the art of playing the rueful underdog. By giving Archer someone to play catch-up to, it forces the character to find new angles to play—even, heaven help us, the occasional (very irritated) voice of reason.

Meanwhile, a lot can be attributed to Zara herself. Although Dew can’t always quite match the sheer energy of the show’s veteran voice cast—and we, personally, would not want to be directly compared to Judy Greer at the absolute heights of her cackling, threatening-to-murder people powers—she’s still able to hang, firing off one-liners at appropriately Archer speed. And while Zara plays at perfection, and gets the better of Archer more often than not, the show also wastes little time in establishing her own dysfunctions. As a character, she works well as a foil to Archer—and Lana, who she gets plenty of screen time with as the season goes on—but she’s also steadily developing into an interesting, screwed-up character in her own right.

And here’s the thing about Archer: Although it’s gotten a bit tired, from time to time, in its latter years, it’s never gotten bad. The show’s central seven cast members are about as good at playing these characters as it’s possible to be, with Benjamin, Greer, Aisha Tyler, Chris Parnell, Lucky Yates, Amber Nash, and series creator Adam Reed serving as the unflagging gifts that just keep on giving, even 14 seasons in. And while it took the show’s newer writers a while to fully acclimate to Archer’s very particular pacing after Reed stepped back from penning individual scripts himself, those growing pains now feel like they’re fading into the past. (“Anglerfish,” for instance, has an all-time funny/obscure “Cask Of Amontillado” joke for those of you who like your Archer gags both highly literary and delightfully dumb.) By giving these fantastic characters someone new to talk to, something new to do, the show has found its latest, and one of its most successful, reinventions. Just in time to end, sure—but there is, in the end, something to be said for going out on top.

Archer season 14 premieres August 30 on FXX