Beloved comedy series Archer will return next year, but the show’s creators have found themselves in what you might call a zone of danger, thanks to the fact that the spy agency where the characters all work is known by the acronym ISIS.
Given what’s been happening lately in the Middle East, that name is now … inappropriate, to say the very least. Don’t worry, though, according to The AV Club, the show’s creators have already decided how they’re going to get around it for season six.
Discussing the upcoming season at New York Comic Con, executive producer Casey Willis said that the show will dispense with the name in a “very smart and subtle way” in the first episode.
Jessica Walter, who voices the formidable Malory Archer, reportedly had to re-record some of her dialogue for the season premiere, to explain [very mild spoiler alert] that everyone now works for the CIA.
Archer creator Adam Reed told The Daily Beast that he and the show’s staff were aware of the rise of the real-life militant group ISIS around the time for a while, and while they weren’t sure how it would affect the show, they knew they did not wish to make light of it.
“We were waiting for it to go away – at least I was,” he said. “Back in season five, FX said, ‘This might be a thing,’ and I thought, ‘Maybe it won’t be? Maybe it’ll be the mole that I’m gonna ignore and nothing will happen.’”
“We got sort of lucky and could organically make a merger with the CIA,” he continued, “so we went back and retroactively painted out the ISIS logos in parts of the show, and we just don’t talk about it in dialogue.”
As The AV Club point out, the FX network are probably now stuck with a bunch of ISIS-branded merchandise that they will never be able to sell (any mention of ISIS has disappeared from their online store), but in the grand scheme of things, this is a very small problem.
Image via FX
