Archer is constantly reinventing itself, from the spy agency of its beginnings to the Archer Vice season to the most recent batch of episodes, where the gang all worked at a private detective agency in Los Angeles.
If you haven’t seen the seventh season yet, then you should maybe skip the rest if this paragraph, but if you have, you’ll know that things ended in a zone of danger, with Sterling Archer apparently shot dead in a swimming pool, and a robot taking his place.
During a recent panel at New York Comic Con, the show’s producer Matt Thompson said that we’re in for another, more drastic change, with the eighth season set to take place in 1947.
The new season, entitled Archer: Dreamland will apparently take place inside the mind of a comatose Sterling Archer as he recovers from his gunshot wounds and imagines himself in a post-WW2 fantasy world.
Archer will be a private detective trying to solve the murder of his partner Woodhouse. George Coe, the actor who played Woodhouse, passed away last year, so presumably, if he appears, his part will be silent.
In Archer’s dream world, Cyril Figgis is a crooked cop, while Pam, now Cyril’s partner, goes by her surname ‘Poovey‘, and is described as the “muscle”.
The no-nonsense Lana Kane is going to be a sultry lounge singer, with Ray Gillette as the trumpet player in her band and Dr Krieger as a bartender. Cheryl will become “the manic heiress to a publishing fortune”, Charlotte Van Der Tunt.
Frequent Archer guest star Jeffery Tambour – who played Sterling’s possible father Len Trexler – is also going to be featured this season, in a role described as a “mob enforcer.”
We’ve also been promised a more prominent and “meaty” role for Jessica Walter‘s Mallory Archer, who now goes by the letter ‘M‘.
A trailer shown at a Comic Con panel in July, but not made available to the general public, shows the characters in the present day, congregating at Woodhouse’s funeral, while Archer lies comatose.
At the time, creator Adam Reed said of the new season’s opener:
“Archer is meeting all these characters for the first time in the first episode. I really don’t know where that will lead us, but I’m really excited to be writing it.”
Matt Thompson added:
“All the characters have changed, but they haven’t changed. It’s really exciting to see Archer walk in and meet Lana for the first time.”
New episodes of Archer are set to premiere in January 2017, which isn’t even that long away, really. As previously reported, the show’s creators recently announced plans to wrap it up after its tenth season.
Source: Polygon.
Photo: FX.
