What can we expect this season and what can you share about some upcoming guest stars?
This season, when Adam [Reed] and I sat down and talked about what we wanted to do, we wanted to get back to what we felt the show was at its core, which is a show about Archer and spying and what I would say is like more visceral action; people going out there and high stakes stuff and people dying and that sort of thing. Last season, we had a blast and we kind of took a detour from what we usually do. They kind of bungled their way around selling cocaine. If you go back and watch, nobody even dies in that season.
And so, what we’re doing now is getting back to what we do best. Archer, he’s a spy. He’s a bad guy who’s a good guy who’s a bad guy, and we’re going to go back to seeing his personal journey in this world to which I think the main focus of the season is a lot about him, a lot about his relationship with “Lana” and how that’s changed when there’s a baby, and we can see Archer taking one step towards being a better person and a better father and then maybe two steps backwards from being not wanting to do that, kind of constantly evolving without evolving. In fact, in the season premiere, we see he’s ran away from being a father all together and he’s off in the jungle somewhere fighting with Japanese soldiers. That is the main thing that I can see happening with this this year.
A couple of things that I’m most excited about are some of the people that we have joining us for this season. One of the things that this show does is it doesn’t really inform people about things that have happened in the past. We’re just kind of always moving forward and we like expect or hope that the audience keeps up with us.
There’s a great character from Season 1 of Archer named Conway Stern who everybody loved because he was somebody who was just as good or better at everything that “Archer” is. The piece is played by Coby Bell and he’s back early on in the season to see what’s happening with him. What I was saying is that that’s one of the things I think that the show does is like we’re not going to go back and tell you everything that happened in Season 1 with Conway Stern. We just hope that you know and can follow along. It’s not necessary to know what happened in Season 1, but it makes the episode more enjoyable.
Some other things that we have happening is we wrote a specific episode for Kumail Nanjiani as a Pakistani spy. We actually wanted to make sure before we wrote the part that he wanted to do it because we couldn’t foresee anybody else doing it and luckily, he agreed to do the part without a script being written, which was really super cool of him. The episode came out pretty great.
Also, meeting Lana’s parents played by C.C.H. Pounder and Keith David, and its kind of fun to see Lana in a slightly different role as the child. Lana is always telling us what to do and kind of being basically our collective conscious. And now, to see her dealing with her parents, it’s pretty fun.
One of my favorite things about that episode is like they’re these Berkeley professors out in California and Archer and the baby and Lana go see them. There’s a moment in the hot tub with Archer and Lana’s parents that pretty much defines who Archer is as a guy. I mean you put him in the hot tub with Lana’s parents and things don’t go well.
Also, back this season; the people that I missed the most in Season 5 were Barry and Katya. They’re both back in episodes this season. I just like the way that Conway Stern works will with Archer because he has somebody to play off of. Barry’s the same way for Archer. He always kind of seems to win and lose. I like it when there is that relationship where Archer can bounce off of somebody so hard. So getting Barry back in an episode and getting Katya back. Actually, the episode that Barry is in is one of our best that we’ve done. Allison Tolman is playing Edie, Pam’s sister, and to have that come together with “Barry’s” return and seeing—there’s this TV troupe. Like Cheers did it really well with Norm’s wife. Norm would walk in and it would be like, “Oh, what’s up with your wife, Norm” and he’d say something awful.
I think Edie was that way for us, Pam’s sister. We always talked about these terrible things that Edie did and we never had any intention of showing you Edie until we got drunk with Allison Tolman at a FX party and listened to her great Wisconsin accent that she did on Fargo and kind of convinced us to do it.
Also, Rob Huebel who we’ve always thought is a super hilarious guy is joining us for a very much—there’s a movie from the ‘70s called the The Eiger Sanction with Clint Eastwood. It’s basically our take on that old Clint Eastwood movie with Rob Huebel as a pretty funny mountain climbing guy.
But, I will say that my very favorite episode of the season isn’t with guest stars. I think the show really works best when it is all of our characters just bitching at each other. You’ll see it like when they all get on a blimp together, they’ll all get on a train together, they’ll all go down to Sealab together.
There’s an episode this season where everybody just gets trapped in an elevator and then they just bitch at each other. I love, because these characters feel so real to me, just listening to them all sit there and bitch at each other. It’s great. It was kind of a challenging episode for us because how do you make trapped in an elevator interesting, and I really think we did it. I really like that one a lot.
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