ARCHER RETURNS!

Are you all as excited as I am? Season Six of the hit FX animated series ARCHER returns tomorrow at 10:00 p.m. Getting a heads up into the series is executive producer Matt Thompson talking about everything ARCHER.

Thompson is not only an executive producer but he has also penned some of the episodes on his own. Along with creator Adam Reed, his work has been seen on Adult Swim and 70/30 Productions with Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo.

Now we get to hear from the man himself about the new season of ARCHER!

So let’s get right to it.

Thanks for joining us Matt and hello! What can we expect from ARCHER this season?

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 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 it’s kind of fun to see Lana in a slightly different role as the child. Lana’s always telling us what to do almost 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 Archer 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; 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.

Do they get baby in on the missions this season?

The baby’s out there, yes. There’s some things that happen with the baby. Like Everybody Loves Raymond, it was never a story about Raymond’s kids. So, this series is not suddenly going to become Archer and Lana’s baby series, but there is parts where the emotion of Archer and Lana especially is heightened because there is parts when the baby is in danger. There’s specifically I think about the Kumail Nanjiani episode and there’s danger for the baby, or even the episode for Lana’s parents and meeting them.

I wouldn’t say it’s like necessarily taking the baby on a mission because I would hope that even though our people are pretty irresponsible, but they wouldn’t just like put it on a baby and go do it, but there are times when definitely the baby’s in danger and we see what happens to our characters because of that.

It was good to see Barry back with ARCHER.

Yes, and the thing that was really nice too is the people at Fargo were really cool to us because there’s a song at the end of the episode, and we usually don’t have that much money to have nice music and they let us use the Fargo TV theme song to heighten the emotion of the last scene of that thing. I was just watching that and it was like really nice for them just to say, “Okay, cool. You guys use it. Go ahead.” It was pretty great.

It will be interesting to see Lana’s parents.

Yes. I was at another Fox party and I was having a drink with Jessica Walter and she saw Keith David and evidently, they’ve known each other for a long time. She grabbed me by my arm and she pulled me over to him and she said, “If Keith David isn’t Lana’s father, I will never speak to you again.” I said, “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Let me write this down. Nice to meet you, Keith. Looking forward to making that happen because I don’t care to have Jessica mad at me.”

Can you tell us about the guest stars for the show and is there any you are still wanting to get?

I keep a list of guest stars on my desk. Sometimes, there’s just not a place for somebody and I just kind of keep things in mind for like, “Oh, we got to get them on the show.”

Right now, and I think it’s still going to happen, is we’re really trying to find something for Carrie Brownstein because I think that she’s so wonderful and funny and great at stuff. But, it still hasn’t actually happened yet.

There is one more that I didn’t mention from earlier, which is we did find something for Matthew Rhys this year. It’s because he’s one of my very favorite people to have a beer with. So, I went to the Super Bowl. Adam Reed and I went to this past Super Bowl that Seattle laid it on them and we sat next to Matthew and we got a little lit. Matthew is from Wales, and he told us a story. He kind of entertained this whole bus load of people with a story about a true thing from history about these Wales separatists who were battling the English in the ‘70s and they blew things up with a couple of bombs and stuff like that.

But, it was such a good tale that he told that we went back and wrote an episode based on his tale. And so, for the very first time, there’s going to be a credit in the episode that says, “Written by Adam Reed from a rousing tale by Matthew Rhys.” Matthew plays the part of the Wales separatist.

There’s a real cool couple of jokes in there, which is this Wales separatist terrorist keeps going in between like, “Hey, can do you an American accent” and he’ll put on this really silly wig and glasses and then he’ll talk in his American accent. We kind of just like kid him about your accent is terrible or whatever, but that’s us kind of joking around with Matthew Rhys about how he’s always putting on a wig and then doing some sort of accent and the whole time, he’s really a guy from Wales, but it’s pretty funny.

How do you see Lana’s thinking this season having to balance the life of Mom and spy?

She’s conflicted. She goes through times of wanting to quit, wanting to get away from it. There’s times where we’re trying to take a vacation from the baby. And so, I think more than ever, Lana seems conflicted and she doesn’t know what she wants to do.

She also will go on a mission and leave the baby in somebody else’s care, which is driving her crazy because, one, Malory thinks that Lana’s breasts are filled with corn syrup or something and she’s constantly fattening up the baby. So, Malory is like feeding the baby ice chips to try and slim the baby down, or else like leaving Pam in charge of the baby and like, “Oh, my God. What happened to the baby? Where’s the baby?”

And so, it creates a lot of stress on Lana. She doesn’t really have a good handle with how to deal with it. She’s kind of making it up as she goes along and sometimes she’s handling it well and sometimes she’s not handling it well. How was that?

How do you direct Aisha going from an action scene to being in a motherly mode?

There are times when Lana and you’re directing Aisha that Lana’s just yelling at people. And so, I think that there’s a lot of times this season where we’re taking a step back from that. We’re seeing her and we’re seeing Aisha Tyler get really loving when she’s talking to her baby, or very protective, which is a different form of anger than just wagging your finger at people.

There’s also an opportunity for Lana— later in the season, we’re going to see a love interest come along and to see her in a very loving, romantic side of her. That’s also interesting. Aisha took each one of those things very much in stride. She is really, really good at this. I’ll find like when we’re directing her and stuff and she’ll do something, then you’ll take a step back and go, “Wow, that was really great, Aisha” because we’re so used to her in the yelling at us mode. Then to give her these opportunities this season to either act so loving to her baby or be in a romantic relationship is really wonderfully fun to see.

So your guest link appears while your having a drink?

Yes. We have a lot of fun whenever we end up at these—so, we’re in Atlanta, Georgia and we have a large company in Atlanta. We have about 120 employees that do Archer and a couple of other things. And so, whenever we come out to LA, we get to go to all these really cool parties and we meet all these people. It’s usually the people that we meet at these parties that we end up sitting there and having a couple of beers with that we’re like, “You know what? Let’s do something.” Otherwise, it’s really just us back in Atlanta hanging out.

Amber Nash says that you and Adam sometimes have to explain to Jessica a lot of the sexual references.

Very true. I think the first time I had to explain to Jessica a reference was her—I think this is like season—I lose track of episodes. So, please correct me if you can look it up. It was Season 2 or 3 and she’s out on a boat with Jakov and they’re spying on Archer. The name of the boat was The Chum Guzzler. “I’m sure that’s some sort of reference. Would you please explain that to me?” I was like, “Do you really want me to, Jessica? I will be happy to explain it to you, man, but I don’t really want to.” So then, I would explain it to her and then she’d go, “Oh, that’s awful. Okay, let’s do it.”

I’ve gotten used to it now. Like you break that ice the first time because you want to treat her the way that she should be treated. She is a person that I believe commands respect, but she also prepares. She’s very prepared for every time she comes in to do a scene. She knows everything about all the parts, what everybody’s doing. She’s an old school actor that prepares for everything. And so, she wants to know what things mean that aren’t in her scene. There’s stuff that is totally not necessary for her to do her job, but she likes knowing the entire thing.

So, like I said, this first time I explained it to her, it was difficult, but then since then, it’s just like you explain it to her and she’s just like, “Oh, my God.” But then, she’s never once refused to do something or anything. She just wants to understand what the joke is. But, I’m pretty sure it was the episode with the Chum Guzzler was the first time we explained to her something we really wished to God we didn’t have to explain.

Talking more about the Archer live scene, how important is that in the mix?

I think it was most important for the people who sit around and think about what the show should do. We needed like to clear our brains out. We wanted to take a step sideways that was still inside of our universe, but do it. More than anything else, it was just like a palate cleanser almost.

Internally, we love it. We loved what that season was. We love that we made a country music album. We love that we did something very different without doing something different. I think it’s some of our strongest work if you can sit back and watch it on the face of it.

At the same time, there’s a reason why shows don’t change their standard formula too hard because it does upset the apple cart a little bit. And so, it was never designed as, “Hey, this is what we’re doing from now on.” It was never even thought of that way. It was just thought of as, “We want to go and take this small break from ourselves that isn’t really even truly a break and then go back to doing what we do best.”

We do realize what we do best is stories about Sterling Archer, him being a dick, but also being a somewhat good guy and some sort of spy, intrigue, people are going to die, and then insert jokes along the way. We do realize that is when the show is working at its best. We went away from that formula last season, but I’m really glad we did. At the same time, I’m just as excited now to get back to doing what it is that we do best.

Will there be sudden departures in the future?

Maybe. I don’t know. Right now, we’re happy to be back to work. We’re happy to be back to work doing what these people were designed to do, but we wouldn’t rule anything out because we haven’t focus grouped the show. We haven’t done anything because somebody said, “This is what you should do.”

My partner and I have always made shows to please himself and myself. I hope that’s the best way that actually quality work gets done. It isn’t done to satisfy some sort of collective need, but instead serves the needs of the producer or the person in charge, but just trying to get your vision across.

So what do you like to watch on television?

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I watch tons of television. I usually shy away from comedies on TV because of when you work on a comedy TV show, it’s all about recognizing joke patterns and such. So, you get really tuned off from the standpoint of like making something make you laugh. But, I usually watch dramas and sports. If it’s football season, I’m kind of football all the time.

I will say there’s a reason why we wanted Matthew Rhys to be on an episode this season. I think The Americans is one of the strongest shows on television. I’m not saying that to tout the FX company line. It’s just really good and the way that they drew you in with that daughter storyline last season was crazy. I’m very much looking forward to them going back into premieres, which I think is in January as well.

There are a lot of other things. I do generally enjoy a lot of the FX shows. Again, I’m not just saying it because I work for FX, but they make smart TV. And so, I find myself more drawn towards the cable things and Netflix and Amazon things. Jeffery Camborne’s show on Amazon is fantastic. I’m watching a lot of the Netflix originals as well. I usually go towards whatever you might be reviewed as smart drama.

Knowing ARCHER is a go for Season Seven is awesome. Does that tell you where the storyline is going?

One thing that you wouldn’t think of that happened, when you get renewed for two seasons and you’re a cartoon show, something happens. It’ll make sense. It’ll take me a second to get there.

Because it’s a cartoon, how good your cartoon looks is all based on money. You can have the most talented people in the world, but it depends on how much money you have to throw at the pipeline and the process. Knowing that we had two seasons left in the show for certain let me hire a particular amount of staff with very safe and secure jobs to say, “Okay, I know I want to make this part right here look better.” So, that money security allowed me to bump up my pipeline.

You’ll see it directly affect Season 6 for the first time. There’s a couple of animations that you’ll notice are better in years past. I was seeing the new promos that I have started seeing. There was a promo of an avalanche that is on TV right now and looking at how that avalanche looks is a direct effect of getting renewed for two seasons. I couldn’t have done that without that stability and knowing that was coming. You’ll see some small action sequences and some small facial animation that is all in direct result to having the safety to doing two seasons at once.

As far as the storyline goes, I would love to sit here and tell you that have this giant board where we make up everything and do it, but we really just do it a season at a time. We know what we want to happen this season. After the season is over, we take a break for the month and then we decide, “All right. What do we want to get done this season?”

So, it’s more about the pipeline and the animators than it is about knowing what we wanted to do in season seven. We don’t know what we’re going to do in Season 7 yet. We don’t know what we’re going to do in Season 7 yet.

It hasn’t been talked about much but how did you feel about the name change of ISIS because of obvious reasons. Was it something you felt an immediate thing to do?

We watched it very closely for a long time and were just hoping that we would never to have to comment on it because we feel like any comment we make on it is just— there’s no way to win that conversation. It’s just a terrible, awful, awful, fucking horrendous situation. And so, when we finally bit the bullet and were like, “All right. We got to go. We’ve got to change.”

What we decided to do was to say, and this is something we’ve kind of been working towards because of our love of Christian Slater and liking Christian. You’re going to see him a lot more this season as our CIA handler. And so, we decided, “Okay, that’s it. ISIS is done. We’re going to be contractors for the CIA.” Right when we did that, all that stuff went down with the CIA now and we’re like, “Oh, God damn it.”

The best joke that I think Jon Benjamin’s made in a long time, somebody asked him this question the other day and they go, “Are you going to change your name from ISIS?” and they’re like, “Yes.” Jon said, “After a lot of thought, we’ve decided to change it to something that hopefully people will hate less. We’re going to have the spy agency now called AIDS.” We decided not to do that, but we are basically contractors for the CIA now for better or for worse.

So Lana has a sister, will we be seeing her?

No, just her parents, C.C.H. Pounder and Keith David.

Maybe in Season 7?

I think that’s a good idea. I just don’t know when we think about big things like that, now we tend to think who is it that would really be that person before we do it. So, I would have to sit down and think about who I would want to play her sister first and then see where it would go from there. But right now, there isn’t a plan for it.

Is there something in particular you are excited about, of course you can’t give us details but maybe a hint?

Something jaw-dropping that we reveal. You’re making me think too hard! Yes, there actually as. You know what? There is, but I don’t want to talk about it.

I’ll tell it to you this way. In years past, I don’t know how much the American public realizes how standards and practices work, but standards and practices people don’t work for the network technically. Things change from time-to-time. It’s not really the standards change. The person changes from time-to-time.

There is something that is happening late in the season and it’s basically Lana having sex. I was watching somebody animate it the other day. It’s awesome. I’m just totally being gross, guy here. It’s pretty great.

What is up with Pam and her sex life? Has she had everyone?

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 our characters are constantly growing even though they don’t really, really and 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.

Will Archer’s personality change much with the baby around?

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.

How about Archer’s Mom Malory? Much change there?

No. She’s still a hard ass. In fact, she greatly disagrees. There’s a couple of great scenes with her and how she’s dealing with the baby specifically. I’m going to try and remember the exact lines.

Like for example, one is Abigene is the baby’s name and it’s named after Lana’s grandmother. In reality, Abigene is the name of Adam Reed’s grandmother, but there’s a great scene where she’s trying to convince Lana by giving her large amounts of money to change the baby’s name to Malory. I think at one point she says, and have the baby christened with her name and “I’ll throw in another $5,000 if you do it in a white church,” which is awful. Sorry, but it made me laugh.

There’s a great part where she believes Lana is fattening the baby. I think specifically to a line about like, “What’s in your breasts? Are they filled with corn syrup?” Whenever she’s in charge of the baby, whenever she’s taking care of the baby, you’ll see her giving the baby ice chips instead of food, or else she’ll be off camera and Archer will be out on a mission. He’ll be yelling back, talking to his mom, saying, “Damn it. You have to feed the damn baby” because she’s very concerned that the baby is getting overweight. So, no, she is not becoming nicer and trying to get into grandma heaven.

How do you keep track on ongoing jokes in the series?

We try really hard on our continuity, and we fail sometimes. We try not to let our failures leave the house, but there’s 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 breasts 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 like let that go. Everything else visually; you should see like small changes in hair style 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. We actually messed up, but went back and corrected it at a later date.

Thanks Matt for sharing everything with us about Season 6 of ARCHER and make sure to mark your social calendar for the series premier of ARCHER at 10:00 p.m. on FX! S;oY�;%�$