I don’t know that a show that includes jokes about William Burroughs and Charles Fredric Andrus as being low-brow. Part of the joy of Archer (when it’s good) is the mix of low brow with incredibly obscure, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, humor
Yeah, the really fun thing about Archer is that you can simultaneously enjoy it on multiple levels. There’s the obvious base-level low-brow stuff, and the razor-sharp dialogue layer under that, and then there’s the layer of out-of-nowhere hyperliterate reference humor underneath that. But if you really pay close attention, the show is also a master class in the structure of comedy (again, very similar to “Arrested Development”). Archer routinely builds callbacks to callbacks to callbacks that invert, subvert, or otherwise-vert your expectations (“Are we not doing ‘phrasing’ anymore?”), and thus keep returning gags astonishingly fresh over the course of years, rather than fading into annoying catchphrasedom.
I’m having a really hard time NOT reading this thread in Archer’s voice.
I’m reading it in Bob Belcher’s voice.
Twice.
The word “curry” was used exactly two times in the episode “Mole Hunt.” FXX aired it last night so I counted.
Now they did go on with the smell comments for less than a minute, literally, less than a minute.
But I guess to someone who thinks that a show like “King of the Hill” which features two straight-arrow, try hard to be politically correct conservatives is terrible (as far as being offensive), I could see where using the word “curry” twice and talking about smell for under 60 seconds would be too much. Archer does more offensive stuff by the middle commercial break than King of the Hill does in an entire season. Though I don’t know if that’s literally true.
Most of the comments that express a preference like the early seasons better.
I don’t care that much for the first season of Archer. The animation’s not good. It’s the typical animation you get in any cartoon. (Quite crude by later standards.) But I think it was late second season, certainly by the third season, the animation became amazing. Sometimes it’s hyper-realistic. Other times (like when they’re in a jungle), it’s like a gorgeous oil painting.
The animation can hold me enthralled even when the storyline (like in the 5th season) does not. Next time they’re in the palace in San Marcos, check out the backgrounds: the detail on the painting frames, the lighting fixtures. When Krieger is with his clones next to the missile, look at how the light from the spots is prismatically haloed.
The level of detail on the firearms, the cars, even rivets is incredible. I’d love to see how it’s done.
Check out this screen-cap from first season’s Mole Hunt
Pam’s office in Mole Hunt.
Look at how blurry the buildings are in the background.
Compare those buildings to the detailed sharpness of the building in this NSFW image from the fourth season
Cyril’s office in The Honeymooners
Also in the first season they really hadn’t figured out what the secondary characters were going to be. So you have them acting in ways that are very uncharacteristic for who we know they are. Like Cheryl wanting to get pregnant and have a baby (when we know she hates babies and thinks pregnancy is like the chest-ripper from Aliens and would never get pregnant) or Archer pounding Pam and Pam complaining about three stitches (when we know she’s a tough street fighter, probably the best fighter at ISIS next to Archer).
I prefer Archer after the characters and animation gelled. And that wasn’t in the first season.
I’ve got no opinion on which seasons of Archer are better. (I binge watched the entire series about a year ago and recall seasons be equally well done), but I just don’t understand this attitude: You’re talking about a comedy series whose draw its the witty dialogue and clever jokes, and you’re mainly judging it on the quality of the animation??? If it was done xkcd stick person style very little would be lost, certainly not the most significant part.
I agree. The dialogue is crisp and the jokes are multi-layered. Nice animation is a bonus, but I don’t see it as a defining characteristic of which season is better.
The comment made me make this thread:
I don’t see what’s wrong about judging based on the quality of the animation for an animated show. In animated shows the visuals are indeed important.
I liked the characters a bit more in the first season, really. They were going for more of the absurdity of an office environment at a spy agency thing with an HR manager who used puppets and an accountant actually used for accounting, etc. Then it turned into “Everyone’s a spy, sure why not” for the sake of wacky plot lines.
I’m not saying it got “Nadir of the Simpsons” bad with the character identities but I liked what they were originally doing more.
It is impossible for the quality of the animation (by this, to be clear, I mean its qualities, not how good or bad it is) to crucially affect the work as a whole. It’s half of what the work is made of. Replacing it with stick figures would change it quite a bit IMO. And BTW XKCD does some pretty sophisticated stuff with stick figures. 
Up to a point. There was that squiggly-line psychiatrist cartoon I just could not watch because it triggered headaches.
Imagine that!
Actually, the joke is that he thinks calling her “black-ish” during a discussion on office diversity is somehow better than “quadroon”. Even when he’s trying to be PC, he’s still an ass.
I love the show for the witty, multi-layered dialogue, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also appreciate that the animation has gotten so much better over the seasons. It’s just crisper, cleaner, something, I don’t know animation buzzwords, but it’s just plain better.
Here is a sample from Season 6
Here is one from Season 1
The newer stuff is just better, to my eye.
The animation is important in an animated show. You can have animation without dialog. You can’t have animation without animation. Archer is an animated TV show which is a visual medium, not a radio broadcast.
I could just as easily say to you, you watched an animated TV show and you’re mainly judging it on the quality of the dialog???
And obviously the producers thought it was important to improve the quality of the animation or they wouldn’t have done it.
I get the impression that you watched 6 seasons of Archer and never noticed that the animation change. That makes me a little sad for you. It’s like someone switched out a Denny’s meal with a gourmet one and you couldn’t tell the difference.
Archer has the best animation I’ve ever seen on a TV show. Significantly better than anything else made for TV today that I’ve seen. It has a level of animation normally reserved for big budget movies.
The style of Archer actually reminds me of Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” where they chose to do bold, stylized characters against a background reminescent of lush Renaissance landscape paintings.
Take a look here and here
and see if that doesn’t remind you stylistically of this and this.
And compare those to this which is what most cartoon jungles look like:
typical TV cartoon jungle
When it comes to Archer you’ve been watching a visual feast, and I hope you can appreciate it now.
If you actually think that stick figures would have made no difference and Archer would have lasted six seasons with stick figures, then you and I have nothing more to say on the subject because you might as well just listen to an audio of it and not bother looking at the screen at all.
As to the dialog in Archer:
The first season had some mentions of Middle-earth, but at this point in time that qualifies as pop culture. I don’t remember the first season having the richness of literary and historical references which is what I love about the dialog in Archer and what later seasons had.
First season Archer simply had not gelled yet.
But that’s the thing, the animation is secondary to the script. The animation only needs to be good enough when you have such great writing and performances. 25 years ago I saw legendary animator Chuck Jones on the old Bob Costas’ *Later *show. This was right after The Simpsons had become huge so Costas asked him about it. Jones said that while he appreciated the return of animation to prime time he still said that it wasn’t “full animation” like he had done in the golden age. In fact, he specifically said that it was more a “radio play” like Rocky & Bullwinkle, where the writing was smart and witty so it could make up for the animation not being super high quality.
And even with shows like this, once they become successful the animation quality is still usually ‘upped’ a bit in later seasons because they have more money. This was done for The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad!, King of the Hill, South Park, Aqua Teen Hunger Force etc.
What would you rather do: listen to an episode of Archer with audio description for when the sound doesn’t make it clear what’s happening; or watch an episode of Archer in a language you do not speak with no subtitles? To me option 1 is 90% as good as the real thing, and option 2 is a pretty boring 20 minutes. If you would actually prefer option 2 then you and I really can not see eye to eye.
Love the show. Even when it’s not at its best, it’s still pretty good.
Here’s a discussion of the latest season: "Archer" Season Six Coherent Preview Thread - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Incidentally, if you love Archer, you might also like Rick and Morty on Cartoon Channel’s Adult Swim. A bizarre, raunchy sf adventure show about a multiverse-hopping mad scientist and his timid grandson. Chris Parnell (Cyril on Archer) does the voice of the kid’s dad (a very similar character to Cyril, as it happens).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_and_Morty