SDCC 2019: FX's 'Archer' confirms Season 11 and an end to Sterling's coma
It’s official: the ‘Archer’ panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 has announced that the show is coming back for an eleventh season. And that’s not all, the show’s titular character, international secret agent Sterling Archer is finally waking up from his coma.
‘Archer’ started out as a cross between ‘The Office’ and ‘James Bond’. It follows the lives of the employees of a private spy organization known as ISIS (no relation to the international terrorists). While the series has been around for ten seasons, the last few seasons of the FX series have taken place in Archer’s mind while his body lies in a coma.
The show tweeted about the announcement saying, "No, you aren’t dreaming. Seriously, you aren’t. #ArcherFXX is coming back for season 11 and he’s wide awake. " - @archerfxx
The coma has allowed the show to reinvent itself every season in increasingly wacky incarnations. The cast of the show, who were in attendance at the show’s panel at SDCC, shared their favorite parts of the coma seasons.
H. Jon Benjamin, who plays Sterling Archer, picked the show’s ninth season ‘Danger Island’ as his favorite. Aisha Tyler and Amber Nash, who play Lana Kane and Pam Poovey respectively, picked ‘Dreamland’, the show’s Season 8. While Tyler is partial to the eighth season because it gave her a chance to sing, Nash loved the season because she got to play a "gender-neutral Detective Poovey."
"I loved the storyline with all of the ladies and I particularly loved seeing Poovey as an old grandfather in the end," Nash explained.
Lucky Yates, who plays resident mad scientist Dr. Krieger, revealed that he is a huge fan of the Dri’n pirates that have been constantly chasing the characters in Season 10.
So far, the coma seasons have allowed the show to step out of its spy/office comedy genre to explore other genres, most recently ‘70s sci-fi in the tenth season. When asked what genre the show could explore next, Jessica Walter, the voice of Sterling’s overbearing mother Malory Archer, suggested doing a political thriller.
"How about politics?” said Walter. “We infiltrate the government. I would play Nancy Pelosi, of course!"
Now that Archer is due to finally wake up, fans of the show will finally get to know what the other characters have actually been up to while he’s been recreating them in his subconscious. The panel joked (we hope) that while Archer was out of commission, Krieger invented FaceApp and “is stealing all your faces and identities.”