Archer Season 8, Dreamland , reimagines the cast and setting, transforming the show more than any previous season. Dreamland may also have found Archer’s conceptual breaking point. The Season 8 Dreamland premiere, “No Good Deed,” lays out a radically new vision for the show, but the remaining 7 episodes have a lot of work to do to prove it’s worth the effort.
While Archer began as a James Bond spoof with some office comedy touches, it enriched its cast of characters over 7 seasons, until its M, Q and Moneypenny equivalents (Mallory Archer, Dr. Krieger and Cheryl Tunt) became more than just office props on which Bond practiced his dry wit. By Season 3, Archer had accomplished what the Bond movies never bothered attempting: creating an ensemble well-drawn enough to mutate.
The show has since been restless with reinvention, not only changing the basic parameters of the narrative — drug dealers in Season 5, private eyes in Season 7 — but shuffling the characters out of the roles that had first defined them. The greatest success was with Pam Poovey, who went from HR rep to bare knuckle brawler to field agent to cocaine fiend, in the process becoming an unexpected main character, often supplanting Lana Kane (from the beginning Archer’s professional foil and on-again, off-again love interest) as the other half of the bantering duo anchored by Archer. Archer ’s focus on the core cast paid off, eventually reaching the point where Ray Gillette, Archer, Pam, Lana, Cheryl, Krieger and Cyril Figgis could spend an entire episode trapped in an elevator — the character’s well-established personality clashes accomplishing the rest.
Archer Dreamland leans heavily on this investment, transmogrifying the characters into completely different roles in a 1940s private eye milieu and counting on our familiarity with the way new roles mirror or thwart our expectations to create dramatic friction. But while a somber opening memorializing Woodhouse (Archer’s valet whose real-life voice actor, George Coe, died in 2015) and establishing Archer’s coma state (he was shot and drowned at the end of Season 7) feels like a well-earned moment of seriousness, the muted tone continues into the Dreamland past. And there, where so much rhetorical effort is spent maintaining the noirish pastiche, the Archer Dreamland premiere begins to feel in over its head.
Sterling Archer is now a low-rent private eye whose partner, Woodhouse, has been murdered. He butts heads with two L.A. cops, Cyril and Poovey, now a man (though she looks and sounds the same as Pam, just swapping her skirt for a three-piece suit). While gender-swapping Pam is one of the more interesting choices made in the Season 8 premiere, it ends up having little effect on her dynamic with Archer.
More interesting is Cyril, whose conniving, put-upon schtick takes on a surprising menace now that he’s abandoned the accountant’s sweater vest for all the powers of a dirty cop. Unlike in every other season, this Cyril has outlets for his resentment and the power to strike back, altering the Archer status quo in such a way as to enliven one of the cast’s more one-note characters with new dramatic possibilities. Transforming Krieger into a fugitive Nazi scientist turned dope-dealing bartender (the premiere episode only reveals the latter role) feels similarly electric. Whereas Krieger’s Nazi past is played more for laughs in previous seasons — he invents like an evil mad scientist, but doesn’t act like one — it’s easy to see how everything we know about Krieger could be weaponized in new Dreamland episodes, pitting the World War 2 traumatized Archer against a Nazi scientist in the era when being a Nazi scientist actually stood for something.
Other characters feel diminished after the transition. While Mallory as “Mother,” a club-owning crime boss, functions much the same as Mallory the spymaster, depersonalizing her relationship with Archer takes away a lot of the familial sting from their interactions. In Archer’s coma hallucination Lana has been idealized as a brassy lounge singer with wit and class that leaves the private eye stymied. Unfortunately, this serves Archer better than Lana, largely consigning her to the stage. Their relationship could go anywhere, but for now it feels dramatically inert — she’s an object of aspiration with no clear plotline of her own. Ray, as her bandleader, feels similarly marginalized.
But really the premiere of Archer Dreamland is all set-up. Some characters have been positioned better than others, but anything can happen in coming episodes, particularly since a labyrinthine serial plot involving acid-loving crime boss Len Trexler, human trafficking and an heiress looking to fake her own death (Cheryl, of course) is clearly making room for the twists-and-turns of latter, more self-conscious noir films like The Long Goodbye and Chinatown. While that means Dreamland is unlikely to get boring, it also loses out on the sense of claustrophobia and high-pressure precision of the taut, studio noirs of the 1950s like Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success or 1948’s The Big Clock.
Which is ultimately the main failure point of the Dreamland premiere — it’s not teeth-gritting enough to be a potboiler and expends all the time usually given over to jokes framing what amounts to respectful homage. With the set-up out of the way, there should be room for jokes in upcoming episodes, but it’s hard to remember much that was funny about the Season 8 premiere. There’s the expected Archer callbacks, slightly modified (“1933 called, they want their gold digger back”) and the kind of riffs on hardboiled narration you’d expect. Only the fact that Archer is delivering the monologue to a dog elevates it above room temperature. It’s hard to shake the sense that Dreamland has overestimated our investment in the Archer characters themselves, rather than the sparks that fly when they’re bashed together. Their characterization is so clear in part because it’s often over-the-top or wacky, so Dreamland’s veneer of seriousness ends up a little dull.
We’ve seen a few episodes of Dreamland after the premiere and while it improves in some ways, the first half of the season never gets as funny as Archer at it’s best. While Dreamland will still appeal to viewers fully invested in Archer, Season 8 doesn’t feel like a show you can dip in or pop on. Like with the later episodes of Archer Vice, seriality begins to feel more like a liability than a mechanism for richer storytelling. The fundamental miscalculation — that we’re more interested in its audacious reinvention than laughing — persists.
