Max - Sultan of Television: Archer: Taking the Streets into the Danger Zone

This past Thursday, FX's Archer premiered its sixth season. After a pretty-damn-good fifth season and a truly stellar third and fourth season, I was quite excited. To say I didn't like the premiere of season six would be an overstatement, but to say I was pleased wouldn't really be true either. While I laughed a couple times and was generally happy to see all of our old friends at The Office Previously Known as ISIS, the episode was a bit underwhelming.

Essentially, the plot was that Sterling Archer, fresh off of a whoring, drinking, night that may or may not have involved a small deer (of which was a pretty funny touch), is given an assignment to blow up a plane in an island from World War Two. Meanwhile, after being taken over by the CIA, the rest of the cast is moving into a new office. While looking for the plane, Archer runs into a Japanese Soldier who does not know that the war has ended. Archer befriends him and helps him return to civilization. The plot was interesting enough and cleverly self-deprecating, saying that the exact plot had been used in other show. However, the main problem was that the laughs seemed a little more forced. Instead of having the lines naturally flowing off the tongue, many of our main characters were just repeating old shtick. Cheryl is crazy, Pam is fat, Lana is sassy, and Malory is an in-command bitch. Nothing was particularly wrong, but nothing seemed completely hilarious either.

I am not willing to write off Archer just yet though. Like all shows, it may have just had an off-episode. And, for an off-episode, it was still pretty damn good. The upcoming episode will be a good notion of whether Archer is loosing it's brilliance or whether it is as good as ever.

The fear though, is a natural occurrence in Television, especially in comedy. Some of the most brilliant comedies ever suffer from one simple problem: running too long. While I know as well as anyone that having your favorite show run for many, many seasons seems awesome, sometimes it can ruin that very love.

Take 30 Rock for an example. The Tina Fey created comedy was something new and exciting when it premiered. The brand of quick, appropriate yet secretly risque, comedy was immediately popular. In the inaugural season, I thought it was one of the funniest shows on TV. The next two seasons were also pretty good, keeping up consistent laughs and making viewers attached to the characters. However, come season four, things had really gotten away from them. The characters seemed like parodies of themselves, the writing started to be repetitive, and the overall show began to suffer. The same thing happened on The Office. That show stayed pretty fantastic for six or seven seasons before the same syndrome happened to it. The characters began to over-emphasize the factors that made them uniquely funny, the plots felt like they had been done before, and, yet again, the overall show began to suffer. So many of the great comedies had this. Yes, Always Sunny is still pretty funny, but compared to season five, it is quite lackluster. A more extreme example is Scrubs which post season four became terrible.

The morale of the story is that with a sixth season, Archer is at risk. Though the first five have been amazing, it may be that the show has already peaked and thus begins its decline. This is the precipice of the show. The point that will either carve it out as one of the longest running, truly hilarious comedies or as a great-until-that-one-point type show.