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Archer - S7 |OT| of Jazz Hands, Suppressing Fire & the Danger Zone - Thursdays on FX

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big ander

Member
That one may have been the best of the season. Liked that it sat a lot of the cast out. it can be fun to leave most of the mission/case to a few characters rather than stuffing everyone in, makes for a tighter focus. "Did you learn nothing from this?" "Heh. No."
Back to normal as far as I can tell, though they're still using an imposter on the intro clip to the show for some reason.
Heh, that's always bugged me way more than it should.
 

Red

Member
H. Jon Benjamin did a great job this episode. He's always good but something about his stammers and terse "yes" and "no" had me cracking up.

So far this season is 3/3.
 

curb

Banned
I watched an episode from the first season last night and the difference in animation between then and now is night and day. I couldn't believe it.
 
- Onion A|V Club review


Also, this is one of the Onion A|V Club's best features and usually well worth a read:

- The Walkthrough: Archer’s Matt Thompson walks us through smashing the status quo
Seven seasons in, Archer continues to take no prisoners when it comes to its own setting and status quo. Just two years after turning its cast (briefly) into drug dealers, the series has hopped coasts for Los Angeles, and the world of private investigation, for its noir-heavy seventh season. The show’s executive producer, Matt Thompson—who, along with creator Adam Reed, helped birth beautifully weird Adult Swim programming like Frisky Dingo and Sealab 2021 before moving over to FX—walked us through the first four episodes of the new season. Alongside discussions of how the new setting has changed both Archer the show and Archer the man, Thompson also revealed whether fan favorite Ray Gillette is “officially” a member of the show’s main cast, and how actress Jessica Walter’s love of New York affected Malory Archer’s anti-L.A. attitudes.
 

BatDan

Bane? Get them on board, I'll call it in.
Barry can never catch a break. Then again, being a colossal dickhead to anything and anyone gives him a short rope.
 
Also, this is one of the Onion A|V Club's best features and usually well worth a read:

- The Walkthrough: Archer’s Matt Thompson walks us through smashing the status quo

AVC: What else is different this season, overall?

MT: There are three big changes that are happening, and we hope you don’t necessarily notice them all, but they all just kind of happen, and they kind of wash over you. The first one is, we changed our act structure, which is important to us, but I don’t think the normal viewer realizes what that means. No matter what, you’re going to have four breaks for TV. A lot of people that consume our show consume it over something like Netflix or Hulu, but for those people who are consuming it as it comes on broadcast, you’re getting commercial breaks. The first change that we made is that we changed it so we have a teaser that goes into our open, that goes into our act one, without a break. Our act structure used to be: teaser, break, act one, break, act two, break, act three, end of show. And now, it’s teaser, open, act one, break, act two, break, act three, break, and a new section, the coda. So we’ve reversed it. We did that for a couple of reasons. We wanted to grab you and keep you inside of this story. It changed the way we do things. It especially changed the way where, we have like a little wrap-up at the end of every show. So that’s the first change that you see.

The obvious one is they’ve changed their location, and they’ve changed their job. I don’t need to really elaborate on that; that’s a big change. The last one is we have changed our color palettes, to some degree. The show has gotten warmer, and the show has gotten older. We don’t really live in any set time period, but I’ve always considered the majority of Archer to take place, stylistically, in some sort of mashup of the very late ’60s. I know that’s a small shift, but that’s important to us as graphics people. Now the show is having a language that is more late ’70s than it is early ’60s. And that’s evident in a lot of the clothes that they wear, and the paintings that are on the wall, and the furniture that’s displayed in the offices. But you know, again, no matter what, it’s a show that has fart jokes, you know? It’s like, you’re not going to sit down and go, “Well, wait a minute, that chair’s probably a chair from the late ’60s!” That’s not what it’s about. It’s about the overall feeling of change.

There are these new bumpers that take place before you go to commercial break. And that’s our homage to early ’70s private detective shows, or Charlie’s Angels. We’re trying to make you have these feelings without knowing that you’re having them. Because they’re all kind of subliminal, hopefully. If we’ve done our job right, it feels different, and you’re like, “Why does it feel different? I’m not sure.” Those are conscious decisions that we’ve made. We changed our location, we changed our job, we changed our act structure, we changed our color palette, we changed the basic time period, even. Shows just don’t do that. We’re not just introducing a baby on Family Ties, or whatever, to say, like, “Hey look, it’s a new storyline!” In fact, when we introduced a baby, it was really only so you get a deeper relation between the two main characters of Lana and Archer. It’s not about the baby. It’s about Lana and Archer. “Yeah yeah, but they have a baby, and the baby’s gonna be cuter, and it needs them.” But it’s not a show about that new character. It’s a show about an evolution of two people and their relationship, and what they mean to each other.
AVC: In that first episode, we have the first of those big cold opens, with J.K. Simmons and Keegan-Michael Key’s detective characters. What kind of thought was put into that big Sunset Boulevard reference at the top?

MT: We looked at a lot of things about what we wanted to do, and what we wanted things to look like. We’ll spend a lot of time this season on a movie set, and get involved with that, but we are creating our own version of Hollywood, and it’s sort of weird. When we first started this show, we wanted to do something like Blade Runner. By that, I mean that Blade Runner had this really cool look of “This is what the future’s going to look like.” It’s gonna look a little bit like the future, and little bit from here, and all these time periods that came together for them, and they picked and chose what worked for them. And we did the same thing on Archer, which is, we want people to have cell phones, but we like 1970s muscle cars, and we really like the way that somebody’s pants were fitting in the late ’50s, or whatever. So we took all these different time periods and put them together, and then we started thinking about going to L.A., and what do we want L.A. to look like? We knew that we wanted to age ourselves up and go to the ’70s. But at the same time, it feels like the most glamorous part, just looking at Hollywood from the outside in, was like the ’50s, and kind of seeing how the movie industry worked then, and so we kind of paid homage to that. And at the same time, having our ’70s time period. So we’re kind of picking and choosing. One of the best examples of that is to go back and look at a movie like Sunset Boulevard. Veronica Deane, and her house, and everything, is a very, very conscious effort for us to ape Sunset Boulevard, and say “This is the kind of Hollywood we’re talking about.” The golden age of Hollywood, if you will. Even though you’re going to see its look is brighter and more like the 1970s, we’re still trying to harken back to that time.
Much more via the link.
 

Alpende

Member
Krieger having faces and hands of everyone is creepy as hell. Wonder what he's gonna do with it, hope they show it in the show.
 

BigAT

Member
Krieger having faces and hands of everyone is creepy as hell. Wonder what he's gonna do with it, hope they show it in the show.

The hands and faces reminded me of (slight spoiler for a sci-fi movie from last year that wasn't Star Wars)
Ex-Machina. I wonder if that's what they were going for.
 

BigAT

Member
Terrible episode. Couldn't even finish it :/

Season is on fire, loving every episode so far.

MtZ9N.gif
 

Switch Back 9

a lot of my threads involve me fucking up somehow. Perhaps I'm a moron?
Mallory being a G was awesome. I love that this show actually acknowledges the fact that she was a badass spy for decades and not just a boozey bitch mom.
 

HT UK

Member
I live in the UK but I'm trying to find somewhere online to legally pay for & watch season 7.

The only one I could find was Amazon.com, but that won't accept my credit card.

Had the same problem with the last season of Always Sunny. Why won't they take my money :(
 

big ander

Member
Yeah. I was thinking the same thing but thought "maybe not" when Cyril was chosen

True but to me just the fact that we know there is a realistic archer mask in the world is enough—now there is the possibility that the body will be either the lookalike henchman OR the mask. I hope they add one or two more possible options/red herrings so the ultimate reveal can be surprising.
 

vypek

Member
True but to me just the fact that we know there is a realistic archer mask in the world is enough—now there is the possibility that the body will be either the lookalike henchman OR the mask. I hope they add one or two more possible options/red herrings so the ultimate reveal can be surprising.

Very true. I wouldn't be surprised if its just some ploy by the agency. Its a random guy they killed and Archer puts the mask Krieger made on him to appear himself is dead or something.
 

Sloane

Banned
Love the season so far, so glad that Malory is back -- and her voice, too! Definitely something that was missing last year.
 
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