Has Archer’s personality or his actions changed at all now that he has a kid?
Yes. I think one of the very first things I said to Susan was the basic struggle this season is for Archer to take one step forward to being a better person and a better father, and then maybe one step back or sideways against being a better person and being a better father. I think the two are very intertwined for him now. There are specific episodes when we see that he is either running away from being a dad, or that he’s trying to get in Lana’s life a little bit more so he can be a father, or there are specific episodes that happen this season that the baby is threatened and we see what happens to Archer because of that.
We’re using the baby as a tool to tell Archer and Lana’s story and deepen their relationship and deepen their emotional standing. It’s not that we’re going to see the baby all the time and like here’s this baby and what’s happening with the baby. It’s really about how that affects Archer and Lana’s emotional state. It’s one of the driving forces of the season.
You guys are really, really great with bringing back recurring jokes and themes and everything from the beginning of an episode to the beginning of the series. There are a lot of shows like How I Met Your Mother or Seinfeld where they bring back old jokes and then there are shows like Scrubs that would forget what they did two episodes ago. How do you guys keep track of your continuity?
We try really hard on our continuity, and we fail sometimes. We try not to let our failures leave the house, but there have been many episodes that we’ve corrected like on the day that we’ve turned them in. Mostly those are visual mistakes where we will forget a tattoo or we’ll forget that somebody’s hair had changed.
Like last season, particularly this is for last season. Last season, Cheryl’s tits got huge because of whatever she was doing with this country music thing. I mean we’re going back to normal size. The number one thing that we couldn’t do visually was we couldn’t track Archer’s bullet holes because he’s had over 40 bullet holes. So, we had to just let that go. Everything else visually, you should see like small changes in hairstyle that’ll stick and then they’ll change, or be it in clothes or whatever.
The things that have happened to a character are sometimes more difficult and we’ll forget. There’s a very specific thing that— we recorded an episode this season of where everybody’s trapped in an elevator together. We recorded it, edited it, started animating it, and realized there was a mistake in the episode. We had to go back and rerecord something. It was about the number of people in the elevator that had seen Lana’s vagina, and we were mistaken that there was only one of them in the elevator that hadn’t because we had forgotten about Cheryl saw it while she was giving birth. Pam saw her vagina when they had sex. I mean you have to go back, and that’s our continuity – how many people have seen that character’s vagina? We actually messed up, but went back and corrected it at a later date.
While we’re talking about how many people have had sex, has everyone had sex with Pam? Or is there still someone who hasn’t?
God dang, I don’t think she has with Cheryl. There’s a spot in this season where things almost go that way and maybe might go that way. It’s intimated. I don’t think she has with Cheryl. If you put a gun to my head, I’d say Cheryl is the only one, but I’m not really positive. We have to sit down and talk to each other real quick and then we go back and research it whenever something like this comes up because we don’t want to make a mistake either.
One of the things that separates our cartoon from other cartoons is that our characters are constantly growing even though they don’t really truly grow. So that means that continuity is important. It’s important that people change clothes. It’s important that people’s bodies slightly change. It’s important that their hair changes and stuff. Those things are important to us, and so we try our best to really not make a mistake there.
Archer premieres tonight on FX.
all images credit to FX
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