The end is nigh for the staff of International Secret Intelligence Service/unnamed drug running crew/Figgis Detective Agency. Archer creator Adam Reed has revealed his intent to bring the FX cult hit animated series about extremely incompetent spies to an end… in approximately three years. Appearing this week on Modern Film School’s Murmur podcast, Reed explained his loose plan for the show’s tenth season to be its last:
The plan is to end Archer after season 10. I don’t know that anybody has talked about that, but that is definitely my plan—to do 8, 9, and 10 and they’re gonna be each shorter seasons of just eight episodes, and then wind it up.…I was gonna end it after 8, but then I had sort of a brain explosion of a way that I could do three more seasons and really keep my interest up. So the three seasons that are coming up are gonna be pretty different from what has come before, and they’re gonna be different from each other.
While the show took a while to find its audience, Archer has become a critical darling and cult hit in part due to Reed’s and the show’s creative team’s willingness to completely change the basic premise whenever they grow bored. The first four seasons of the show, which follows the staff of fictional NYC-based private espionage company International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS), was essentially a parody version of Mad Men meets James Bond. For season five, the setting flipped so that the main characters became drug runners in league with the CIA. With the most recent seventh season, the main characters relocated to Los Angeles where they established a private detective agency.
Does this mean three more deliberately strange reboots? It would seem so. But at least there’ll be three more years of Danger Zone and Phrasing.
