<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"\n\nAlex Pappademas: Discussion question: Are we the only people on the planet watching Archer, on F/X?\n\nDan Fierman: Answer: I really think we are. This has all the hallmarks of a show that will be taken from us far too soon. It's fast. It's vicious. It's extremely offensive and it relies on obscure references. I have already written the obit in my head and that depresses me.\n\nAlex: And it's a cartoon. Which I understand is sort of a dealbreaker for some people\u2014even after 79 seasons of The Simpsons, people find animation un-wrap-head-roundable. I know, okay? But it became pretty clear to me a long time ago that the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block\u2014which, for a while, included Archer creator Adam Reed's equally awesome supervillain satire Frisky Dingo\u2014was the best-written comedy lineup on TV. Besides, Archer is about spies! Everybody loves spies.\n\nAnd are you saying that calling a sex-robot \"Fister Roboto\" is an \"obscure reference\"?\n\nDan Maybe. And I also think, that, you know, that the great American public may not be ready for a major character who has a choking fetish.\n\nBut you're right. The delight of Archer\u2014and maybe it's best joke\u2014is that it looks like Mad Men. All skinny ties, buxom babes, and killer suits. It's just when the characters open their mouths that things go to hell from a people-actually-watching-in-large-numbers perspective. Interracial porn. Wanton nudity. Roughly five fisting jokes per episode. I mean, I get why America isn't exactly tuning in in droves, but I think the last show I've rewinded with this much oh-my-God-did-they-just-say-that frequency while watching was Arrested Development. And that's not exactly a coincidence.\n\nAlex:  Well, like Mad Men, it's about terrible people, which I know puts an attic-crawlspace-like ceiling on your audience. Nobody, in the grand scheme of things, watches Mad Men, either.\n\nBut have you watched any of the Connery Bond movies lately? Bond is a total dick! Archer basically takes the Bond-movie fantasy of consequence-free swinging-dickishness to its logical extreme\u2014 Archer is an unscrupulous, petty jerk to everybody. The secretaries at the covert-ops agency he works for\u2014it's run by his mom, played brilliantly by Jessica Walter, and the show gets maximum Oedipal weirdness out of this situation\u2014have HR on speed-dial because of the awful things he says to them. The only thing I've seen in the last year or so that compares to this show's breakneck screwball-comedy nastiness is Armando Iannucci's stuff\u2014the movie In The Loop and The Thick of It, the BBC series it was based on.\n\nI think I'm answering my own question about why no one is watching this. I think it's possible that people who clicked away from this post when I said \"Fister Roboto\" actually came back so that they could click away again when I invoked the BBC.\n\nUm, does it help that it has the best voice cast assembled for a TV cartoon, like, ever? There's Walter, basically doing Lucille Bluth as an espionage contractor. H. Jon Benjamin, of more or less every good Adult Swim show\u2014Home Movies!\u2014as Sterling Archer. Aisha Tyler as his long-suffering partner. Judy Greer, also of Arrested Development, as the aforementioned choking fetishist, who seems that much more depraved because I'm convinced they draw her to look like Sarah Palin.\n\nBecause so much of the humor depends on these escalating and accelerating volleys of insults, and on the way you never know how a character's going to respond, it's hard to quote this show, but I will now attempt to do so. In one episode, Archer's mom is giving him a hard time about their last company dinner party, at which Archer's date raided his mom's medecine cabinet and ended up passing out in her food. Archer: \"It's not her fault! Who puts Oxycontin in a Xanax bottle?\" Mom, indignant: \"People with servants!\"\n\nDan:  I feel we may have hurt our cause here. Listen, all people really need to know is that it's on at 10 tonight, just waiting to fill the hole in your heart after the end-credits on 30 Rock roll. Please watch. We need someone else to talk to about this show.\n\nObviously."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/the-verge-endorsement-archer>