Archer: Season 3

I was ready to just write up a quick piece on what specific things make Archer such a consistently enjoyable show to me in addition to its humor, but after going back and reading my posts on the first two seasons I think I'd just be repeating myself by pointing out its crisp animation and lifestyle porn qualities. So let me be lazy and sloppy and give a few stray thoughts on more things the show does so well.

• Since the show is animated, episodes can be set virtually anywhere. Live action shows have to spend substantial amounts of money to take us to new places every week; Archer, by contrast, has set episodes in fully detailed environments like the Bayou, the Swiss Alps, Monaco, impoverished Soviet Russia, the Turkmen desert, pirate islands in the South Pacific, the snowy woods of Vermont, a cruise ship, a blimp, a train, a space station... it's an impressive list, to say the least, and the environmental diversity lends itself very well to the variety of jokes, stereotype-based or otherwise, that the show serves up.
• The show is essentially a dysfunctional workplace comedy, of which there are and always have been plenty on TV. Still, it has to be the most diversely dysfunctional place I've seen. You've got a horrible boss running the show, a gay agent who faked paralysis for the benefits, a billionaire secretary who happens to be a masochistic choke fetishist, a crude and sloppy bisexual HR rep who moonlights as a drag racer, a creepy mad scientist married to his own computer code, a sad sack sex addict who can't shoot a gun for shit, an arch-rival who has slowly turned into a full on cyborg during the show's run, and at the center of it all, two supremely gifted secret agents with a  complicated sexual history and plenty of contempt for each other. Complete madness, I tell you, and so many possibilities for plots and jokes.
• Lastly, Archer also has the best transitional dialogue I've ever seen. Almost every time the scene shifts to different characters in another area, the first line spoken in the new scene will double as a line that could have been spoken in response to the last line spoken in the last scene. Just another little quirk that doesn't necessarily make the show any funnier, but shows how clever it can be.

So yeah. Watch Archer if you aren't already doing so. Good stuff. Real good stuff.