Archer's season 8 plans could be the greatest fuck-you to continuity since Sledge Hammer!'s nutty resolution to its nuclear-blast cliffhanger

When we last saw Sterling Archer, he was, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, face down in a pool and dead from multiple gunshot wounds. But that shocker of a season finale twist ending back in June was made less shocking by both FX's renewal of Archer for three more seasons and Archer creator Adam Reed's confirmation that the 10th season will be the final one for the longest-lasting of all his animated shows. So we're not through yet with the adventures of the world's most immature spy/P.I., and Reed has now come up with a crazy way (but it's typical for this show, which once had a poisoned Archer hallucinating that he was Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait) to continue on with those adventures despite killing off the title character.

At a New York Comic Con panel last week, Reed announced that when Archer resumes on FX in 2017, it will reboot itself again like it did in both 2014--when the main characters switched from espionage work to drug dealing (while Cheryl/Carol became a country singer) during the season-long arc known as "Archer Vice"--and March of this year. The seventh and most recent season took place in Hollywood and had Archer, Lana and Ray working as private eyes for Cyril, their now-defunct intelligence agency's former accountant. The eighth season will take place in an alternate timeline in 1947.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Archer, "Fugue and Riffs"

Shortly after the conclusion of Archer's seventh season, a largely satisfying season that rebooted Adam Reed's profane spy spoof as a private eye genre spoof, FX announced last month that it has renewed Archer for three more seasons. From January 23, 2013, here's a repost of my discussion of one of Archer's best episodes from its days as a spy show (as well as the days when the name ISIS didn't have depressing connotations like it does today). This episode, like all other episodes from Archer's first six seasons, can currently be streamed on Netflix and Hulu.

"Fugue and Riffs" is another sharply written Archer story involving ISIS agent Sterling Archer's ongoing conflict with his mother/boss Malory (Jessica Walter), and it contains a brilliant crossover with lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin's other current cartoon, more semi-nudity from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) and esoteric references that are funny simply because they're so damn esoteric (British spy hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon! Manning Coles, the duo that created Hambledon! The star of Shazam! Émile Zola!). You won't see Spidey cracking a joke that's a nod to Zola's "J'accuse" letter during Ultimate Spider-Man, that's for damn sure.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "Deadly Velvet: Part II"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



So when Archer's seventh season opened with a dead Archer lying in the pool a la Sunset Boulevard, I was expecting the spy-turned-P.I.'s demise to turn out to be a fakeout. Then when Archer's deranged co-worker Krieger was later seen putting the finishing touches on his robot doubles of all the Figgis Agency employees, I suspected the Archerbot would be the corpse in that pool. "Deadly Velvet: Part II"--the conclusion of an ambitious season that took a few more chances storytelling-wise than even the similarly ambitious "Archer Vice" arc did and was largely successful--totally proved me wrong. I didn't expect Archer creator Adam Reed to go through with it and actually kill off the title character instead of placing the Archerbot in the pool and letting the real Archer go scot-free.

Reed's commitment to not scamming the audience (I'm relieved that he didn't go for the sucker's move of saying the body belonged to a clone or an imposter wearing Archer's face) is admirable. But we all know that in a spy-fi universe where mortally wounded men live on as cyborgs and Nazi scientists get married to sentient holograms, Archer's death won't hold, unless FX cancels the show. Right now, the low-rated Archer's future on FX looks kind of iffy because the network hasn't renewed it yet. But if FX does renew the show, our favorite immature P.I. with a weird love for Shazam! (the '70s TV show, not the app) will be back to pulling voicemail pranks and pestering Cyril in no time.

So killing off Archer like that is kind of pointless, especially in an increasingly repetitive year of TV that's been overloaded with character deaths and death fakeouts to keep shows from losing their buzz on social media, and if an eighth season does take place, his murder at the hands of femme fatale Veronica Deane would lose much of its impact because there's no way the show would go on without H. Jon Benjamin and with Malory and A.J. being the only Archers around. But Archer's death gives Jessica Walter's character more to do than just deliver her usual pithy insults--so she does care about her son, even though it never appears to be that way--and it results in Walter becoming the MVP of the finale. Walter also gets the finale's biggest laugh when her pop-culturally illiterate character--whose cluelessness about the obscure pop culture (or literary) references her son, Pam, Cheryl and Krieger are so fond of dropping on the regular appears to have been lifted from Walter's real-life cluelessness about such references--hears the term "Turing test" for the first time and wonders if the term comes from "Star War." And I especially like how Archer's sexual attraction to the 50-year-old movie star, which contains disgusting Freudian overtones, literally became the death of him. His infatuation with Veronica didn't just destroy his relationship with Lana. It also ended his life. The show's character designers (including Chi Duong, whose Archer character designs can be glimpsed on her Tumblr, which she named Mochi Baby) further added to the grossness of Archer's Freudian infatuation by interestingly making Veronica closely resemble Walter when she starred in Grand Prix.

http://lovemochibaby.tumblr.com/post/145357833983/this-is-a-drawing-i-did-for-one-of-our-billboard

The villains on Archer have ranged from forgettable to perfectly cast (like when Timothy Olyphant was the highlight of an Archer episode that some have viewed as homophobic or when Jon Hamm guest-starred in the role of Captain Murphy, an old character from Reed and Matt Thompson's Sealab 2021). Those characters have never really been the highlights of Archer, but thanks to both the season-long insurance scam that she orchestrated behind the scenes and the consequences of that scam, Veronica marks the first time that an Archer villain has been truly formidable and intriguing. Plus Reed and Thompson recruited a superb performer to voice Veronica and bring her to noirish life this season: Mary McDonald-Lewis. Her name won't mean much to viewers who pay very little attention to cartoon voice actors, but to us '80s kids who grew up watching G.I. Joe, she's like an old friend. McDonald-Lewis was the voice of G.I. Joe heroine Lady Jaye. So Archer was killed by Lady Jaye.

And maybe FX as well--if it goes all Red Wedding on us like ABC and Fox did this spring.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "The Figgis Agency"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



Two seasons ago, Archer's season-long experiment as "Archer Vice" was a divisive one for fans of the animated spy spoof. The viewers who disliked the kinds of storytelling that resulted from Archer creator Adam Reed's decision to change the characters' jobs from spies to drug dealers found the fifth season to be aimless, while I enjoyed Reed's willingness to experiment that season and found the subsequent season, in which the perpetually immature Archer, new mom Lana, Malory and Ray returned to spying and worked as independent contractors for the CIA, to be the more aimless season.

But as Archer has gotten older, the show's animators have developed a knack for crafting satisfying action sequences that have gotten more impressive in scale and scope with each year. That's mostly why my favorite episode from Archer's sixth season is "The Kanes." Lana's visit to her parents' house in Berkeley presented a great balance of large-scale action (the episode's homage to the classic Bullitt car chase was second to the avalanche in "The Archer Sanction" as an impressive sixth-season set piece) and the smaller-scale kind of character-based comedy that's pulled off well by bottle episodes like "Vision Quest."

A lot of the rest of Archer's sixth season suffered from a lack of stakes. Sure, the addition of a baby to the relationship between Archer and Lana brought a bit of welcome depth to the character of Archer, but Reed seemed to be sleepwalking through the same kinds of espionage storylines he appeared to be getting bored with shortly before the "Archer Vice" revamp. Archer's new season seeks to rectify the lack of stakes by changing the show's backdrop again to Hollywood and putting the disgraced (and after the disastrous events in "Drastic Voyage," unemployed) spies to work as private investigators. The P.I. storylines will hopefully restore some stakes to the show and allow for the animators to continue to outdo themselves in the action department, and if "The Figgis Agency," Archer's seventh-season premiere, is any indication, Archer's new detective agency may just turn out to be a better creative shot in the arm for the show than the cocaine-slinging thing.

Technically, it's Cyril's detective agency, and Archer, Lana and Ray are his unlicensed gumshoes, applying their spying skills to investigative work. So far, Archer isn't exactly Michael Westen yet. In "The Figgis Agency," he gets badly bitten by a couple of attack dogs in a scene that made me wince and is straight out of The Boys from Brazil, the same movie that inspired Krieger's possible origins as a Hitler clone. He also falls down the same canyon twice and fails to notice that Cyril's client (Ona Grauer, a.k.a. Bionic Katya), a movie star who hired the titular agency to retrieve a disk that's in the hands of powerful L.A. sleazebag Alan Shapiro (Patton Oswalt, who seems to be channeling both the villainous Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell characters from The Long Goodbye), is actually an imposter. It's like if all the spy tips that pulled Michael out of countless jams as a P.I. during Burn Notice went wrong.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week: Archer, "Vision Quest"

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week is no longer a weekly feature, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV one week or a few weeks after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the occasional "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

You know that "Vision Quest," a bottle episode of Archer that finds the characters trapped in a broken elevator for the entire story, is a special Archer episode when it takes two of its most deranged and oblivious-to-reality characters, Cheryl/Carol (Judy Greer) and Krieger (Lucky Yates), the spy gadget builder and possible Hitler clone a la The Boys from Brazil, and gives them each a rare moment of lucidity before restoring them to their usual insanity and obliviousness. Carol (her name this week) has that moment when she perfectly breaks down each of the other characters she's trapped in the elevator with (Carol to Archer: "You want a drink;" Carol to Lana: "You wanna lecture us;" Carol to Cyril: "You wanna masturbate;" Carol to Krieger: "And you're scared that we'll figure out you're actually just a Krieger clone"). Krieger has that moment when he explains that he jammed everyone's cell phones because he's tired of everybody staring at their phones and not having conversations with each other. Krieger hates smartphone zombies just like I do? Go, Krieger!

Den of Geek put it best when they said, "The beauty of Archer's 'Vision Quest' is that it uses the elevator trope to teach its characters absolutely nothing." Usually, bottle episodes of other shows--from Parks and Recreation's recent "Leslie and Ron" to Community's many tributes to The Breakfast Club, the John Hughes flick that's basically one big bottle episode in the form of a feature film--deprive the characters of their comfort zones and inhibitions, strip them bare figuratively (and sometimes literally, for fan service reasons) and put them through a situation where they experience character growth or reach some sort of dramatic understanding after a prior conflict tore them apart. Oh yeah, and bottle episodes are cheap to make.

Confined to just one location or two or three, a bottle episode often acts as sort of a smaller-scale breather from expensive shoots. In Archer's case, the animators needed a bottle episode--I'm glad they went with that instead of a godawful clip show--after laboring over some really expensive and ambitious animation in the past few episodes, particularly the beautifully animated avalanche sequence for "The Archer Sanction," a good example of the raised budget FX gave to Archer this season. "Vision Quest" was what Archer creator Adam Reed--who's remarkably written or co-written every single prior Archer episode--came up with to ease the animators' pain. The episode, which Reed wrote in less than two days, takes its title from the 1985 Matthew Modine high-school wrestling flick that's best remembered for introducing Madonna's "Crazy for You" (outside America, Vision Quest was actually retitled Crazy for You), and it uses that movie for a great episode-concluding punchline.

This least expensive and action-y of Archer episodes has turned out to be the funniest episode of Archer's sixth season so far--remarkably, there's so little spycraft in this episode that at times, "Vision Quest" could be mistaken for an episode of Soap from the '70s or some non-espionage sitcom where characters argue profanely--and it's a unique bottle episode because unlike other bottle episodes where characters experience some growth, Archer, Lana, Cyril, Ray, Pam, Carol and Krieger experience no growth at all. "Vision Quest" concludes with them being far worse assholes to each other than they were at the beginning. Archer's latest bottle episode takes the tendency for many other bottle episodes to either go overboard on the navel-gazing--or lose too many of the funny or sharp qualities we like about the "normal" episodes--and gleefully proceeds to jerk off all over it.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "Sea Tunt: Part II" (from April 17, 2013)

The producers forced Jon Hamm to wear underwear during this role as well.

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS. Beginning this week, "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" is in reruns. A different older show (from either earlier this year or before) will be revisited each week. "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" will return in July with all-new reviews. Because this week marks both the end of Mad Men until 2015 and the release of Maleficent, it's time to flash back to an episode that featured both one of Jon Hamm's countless comedic guest shots and Maleficent-esque Malory Archer being her usual Maleficent-esque self. Plus Aisha Tyler mentioned this same episode in a lengthy Q&A Esquire posted this week.

Damn. So Lana Kane is pregnant, via an unspecified sperm donor. Unlike Ray Gillette ending up confined to a wheelchair once again (by the way, a bunch of Sterling/Ray shippers somewhere must be having a field day over the tickling scene that causes Ray's re-crippling), I didn't see that one coming. However, thanks to all that time I spent in TV Clichés 101, when Lana started puking while heading off with the other agents to stop eco-terrorist Captain Murphy in the second half of "Sea Tunt," Archer's fourth-season finale, I knew right there she was with child. It explains her irritability and largely unspoken concern about settling down and having a life outside of ISIS in recent episodes. I appreciate how Archer creator Adam Reed didn't resort to having Lana spell out her concern in dialogue and chose to have her constantly interrupted before she could spell it out during those episodes. It shows how much Reed respects the audience's intelligence, unlike some other animated series showrunners (*cough*Ultimate Spider-Man writers*cough*).

Archer, Lana, Cecil and Ray discover that Murphy was faking his possession of nerve gas missiles, which makes him, along with Malory and Eugene Mirman's Cecil Tunt, one of several characters this season who concocted lies to get more money because they're broke. Killing off Murphy with a soda machine emblazoned with the last name of the late Harry Goz, the actor who voiced Murphy on Reed and Matt Thompson's Sealab 2021, is Reed and Thompson's twisted and oddly affecting way of both paying tribute to Goz and saying that not even Jon Hamm in the role of Murphy can compare to Goz.

The other revelation about Murphy--he doesn't have any personnel with him at Sealab--is Reed's clever way of working around the fact that Cartoon Network's legal department really did a number on Reed and prevented him from using all the other characters from Sealab. The absence of lewd and frequently nude Debbie DuPree, Sealab's precursor to Cheryl/Carol and Pam, is particularly glaring because she would have fit right in with the Archer universe. Maybe Reed should have emulated Murphy, Malory and Cecil and lied to trick Cartoon Network into giving him the rights to the other characters.

Despite the lack of those characters and the rather minimal screen time given to Mirman and Kristen Schaal in the second half, "Sea Tunt" is a satisfying season finale, thanks to the show's always terrific dialogue (especially when the agents argue over undercover personas and when Cyril frequently snipes at Lana because he's pissed that he's not her baby's father) and great character moments like Archer setting aside his usual asshole self for a second to let Lana know that he wants her to be a better mom than Malory was. Another thing I like about "Sea Tunt" is that it's given me an excuse to revisit one of the greatest--but way too short--TV themes of all time, performed by the indie pop band Calamine.



Memorable quotes:
* Murphy, as he dies: "Forgive my candor. I just felt my spleen slip out of what was my anus."

* Murphy's last words: "Crushed by an off-brand drink machine. Oh my God, just like that old gypsy woman sa--"

* Lana, as Archer lets himself drown Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio style to save her and her baby: "Okay, here it comes! You just gotta relax and let it go in your mouth!" Archer: "Phrasing!"

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "Arrival/Departure"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Earlier this week, in a nice little audio essay by NPR TV critic Eric Deggans ("TV's roster of late-night talk show hosts is whiter than a bobsledding team from Scandinavia."), he recommended to CBS that they should consider handing over the Late Late Show time slot to Archer cast member Aisha Tyler if the enjoyably off-kilter Craig Ferguson quits The Late Late Show. In addition to being a funny stand-up and a decent interviewer during her own podcast Girl on Guy, the current Whose Line Is It Anyway? host has plenty of TV interviewing experience (she's one of the 80 jillion hosts of The Talk on CBS and was even once a frontrunner to replace Craig Kilborn, Ferguson's predecessor), so she'd be the perfect replacement for Ferguson.

Plus a nightly show wouldn't interfere with Tyler's voice work on Archer (according to another Archer cast member, Judy Greer, it takes about only 30 minutes to record lines for the show). Her role as Lana Kane, the seemingly level-headed and continually frustrated ISIS agent, closet Republican and now, new mother, easily outstrips all her previous acting roles, much like how Mark Hamill's voice work as the Joker for Batman: The Animated Series, the B:TAS spinoff movies and the Batman: Arkham Asylum video game franchise is the best thing Hamill ever did, even more so than his on-camera work in the Star Wars movies (or his campy guest shots as the Trickster on the '90s Flash TV series).

In Archer's satisfying fifth-season finale, which finds the gang still stuck in the fictional dictatorship of San Marcos, Tyler continues to demonstrate why she's a tremendous voice actor, whether it's when her character's experiencing what has to be the first sitcom childbirth scene in TV history where the mom gets slapped and punched around by other women (I particularly love how the animators gave Lana such bloodshot eyes while she's in labor) or when Lana's quietly introducing Archer to their baby daughter Abbijean. There are times during Archer's run when I've felt like Lana is on the underwritten side in her role as the straight man to the likes of Archer, Malory, Cheryl/Carol/Cherlene and Pam, despite how much life and nuance Tyler brings to her character. But when Lana reveals to a suddenly tinnitus-stricken Archer in "Arrival/Departure" that she stole his sperm in order to procreate, it's a great reminder that Lana isn't always as level-headed as she thinks she is and that she's capable of being as batshit twisted as the rest of the gang.

"So I guess it maybe wasn't the most ethical thing I've ever done in my entire life," muses Lana to an adrift and distracted Archer. It's not the only example of unethical behavior in "Arrival/Departure." There's also the whole convoluted deal that had the former ISIS employees (unsuccessfully) slinging cocaine for the CIA, an arrangement that turns out to have been masterminded by Archer and Malory, while everyone else in the gang was kept in the dark about Archer and Malory's involvement in the CIA-ISIS deal. Archer's bold, season-long experiment as "Archer Vice," which is brought to an end in this episode by Malory successfully blackmailing CIA operative Holly (Gary Cole) to restore ISIS to her, was fun while it lasted. It proved that the show could still be enjoyable without the spy agency backdrop and that Archer creator Adam Reed could handle much more ambitious storytelling as capably and effectively as he did with the mission-of-the-week structure during the show's previous seasons (particularly the second and third ones).

The fiasco that was the gang's cocaine mission also gave a new sense of purpose to secondary characters who have always been funny but whose subplots were starting to feel repetitive late last season, particularly Cyril and to a lesser extent, Cherlene. Her new career as a country singer spawned perhaps the show's cleverest piece of tie-in merchandise, an actual country album featuring musician Jessy Lynn Martens as Cherlene (one of its tracks, "Cherlene's Broken Hearts & Auto Parts," a cover of album producer Kevn Kinney's "Broken Hearts and Auto Parts," is briefly used in this episode as source music while the gang attempts to flee San Marcos).

So now that ISIS is back in the picture, I hope Reed doesn't revert next season to the mission-of-the-week structure that he admitted was starting to bore him last year. "Archer Vice" was as close as Archer got to the Wiseguy approach of storytelling (as in one long undercover mission lasting for seven to 12 episodes), which I've always wanted to see more spy shows experiment with (missions-of-the-week are more their jam). Earlier this year, Reed said he was considering sending the gang to prison for Archer's sixth season, but I like to think he remembered the tedium of My Name Is Earl's season behind bars and then dumped the idea.

Maybe Reed should send the ISIS agents to go undercover as execs from Cherlene's record label for the entire season, a la Wiseguy's Dead Dog Records arc. But whatever Reed decides to do with ISIS next season, let's hope it continues to result in funny bits of business like Cyril delivering Rambo's climactic monologue from First Blood after Juliana Calderon (Lauren Cohan) dumps him, Cherlene referring to Lana's vagina as mauve or Abbijean being her father's daughter when she does Archer's "Hold up, I'm drinking" gesture while being breastfed. And now that Lana's the mom she always wanted to be, hopefully, the addition of a baby won't ruin Archer (like it has with too many other sitcoms) and put a damper on how much of a great role Lana has been for Tyler, whether or not she becomes, outside of the show, the late-night host she deserves to be and a sea of mauveness in the way-too-lily-white desert that is the late-night landscape.

Stray observations/memorable quotes:
* Remember all those clips in the montage that concluded "White Elephant" at the start of the season, which I said was a "season 5 trailer that's badly disguised as Sterling's fantasy sequence about his new life"? Most of those clips turned out to be fake. As Reed said, "almost none of the things in the original trailer as written wound up in the season. So we went back--and I guess how they make real trailers--watched seven episodes and used footage to put in the trailer." Shit. I was really looking forward to seeing more of Cherlene fending off adversaries with a rocket launcher.

* "Aww... All the gardeners are running away."

* "Psh! You know how many times I've helped a cow give birth in the barn? Plus one time, my sister Edie? Well, she couldn't have it in the house. Long story. A long, racist story."

* Malory: "Lana Kane, you have known me for a long, long time. When have I ever been honest with Sterling?" Lana: "Huh." Malory: "Exactly."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "Southbound and Down"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

"Southbound and Down," Archer's tribute to Burt Reynolds' Smokey and the Bandit movies, a franchise that both Archer creator Adam Reed and Archer himself are fans of, is an enjoyable episode largely because you don't have to have seen any of those movies to be entertained by the episode. I've never seen any of the Bandit movies (there's only one movie from Reynolds' box-office glory days that I really dig, and that's The Longest Yard). All I know about the Bandit flicks are that Sally Field is, like Pam riding shotgun in Archer's Bandit-style Trans Am, the one who does with Reynolds "snappy dialogue underscored by sexual attraction" in the first two Bandits; the theme song "East Bound and Down" was sung by co-star Jerry Reed; legendary stuntman Hal Needham directed the first two; and The Cannonball Run, which I did see as a kid thanks to early '80s HBO running it five times a day, was basically Bandit meets The Gumball Rally. Yet I still laughed throughout "Southbound and Down."

That's mainly because the Bandit references are kept to a minimum--kind of an odd move for a show where much of its humor thrives on how arcane its references are--and the dialogue is up to Archer's usual high standards, from a crazy Malory rant about PBS that sounds like every teabagger's rant about PBS to a nice bit of character depth where Archer honestly points out to Pam that she wasn't a ginormous asshole before she got hooked on coke and lost a shit-ton of weight. As Pam, Amber Nash owns this episode, whether it's displaying a rarely seen insecure side of Pam in that scene where Archer admits everyone liked her better before the coke--I don't think I've ever seen Pam be concerned about what others think of her, so this is an interesting turn in her character--or being a thorn in the side to Archer, especially after her inability to keep her mouth shut about their coke stash sends a biker gang chasing after them to take their stash.

The purpose of the Archer crew's cross-country trip in "Southbound and Down" is not to transport beer or an elephant but to drive Cherlene to a musical guest appearance on some Austin City Limits knockoff. I don't care for country music--by the way, Cherlene's cover of "East Bound and Down," performed by Judy Greer's musical stand-in Jessy Lynn Martens, is part of an actual Cherlene album that the show is releasing next week--but I'm eager to see how Malory, Archer, Lana and Cyril will handle both maneuvering their way into the country music industry and doing what I assume will be laundering their drug money into Cherlene's burgeoning country music career. And Kenny Loggins, the singer of Archer's favorite song from Top Gun and a guest artist on Cherlene's album, will somehow be involved in all this next week? I'm down for this, as long as his voice acting is better than Anthony Bourdain's.

Memorable quotes:
* "It's public television. They don't pay anything. All they do is suck money in. They take our taxes..." "Or donations, whatever." "Of pre-tax dollars from pot-taking Bolshevik lesbian couples! Then PBS mixes it all in with their huge NEA grants, launders it in inner-city methadone clinics and pumps it right back out to pro-abortion super PACs!"

* Malory: "Because if we miss that taping, I won't be responsible for my actions." Lana: "Are you ever?" Malory: "She said, single and pregnant. Oh, wait."

* Ray, whose newly repaired cybernetic implants are being forced by Krieger to make him goosestep: "This quit being funny two hours ago!" Krieger: "It's not supposed to be funny."

* "Ow! Whose ring is that, the Pope's?!"

* "We're talking about Texas. Somebody somewhere wants enough cocaine to forget they live there." "Yeah, but not a hundred pounds!" "Maybe we'll get lucky, find an entire town that wants to commit suicide."

* "Look, how hot am I now? Let me answer that for you. As balls."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "House Call"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

When FX's Archer was a spy comedy, it got lots of comedic mileage out of placing its immature and dickish characters in foreign locations--globetrotting is a requirement for a spy show, even ones like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Alias that didn't have the budget or the balls to leave Hollywood and stuck to faking foreign locations on a backlot--but sometimes, an Archer episode would confine itself to just one location, and the results were even more hysterical. I'm thinking the dinner party in "Lo Scandalo" or ISIS headquarters in last season's "Legs."

This week's "House Call"--which sees Archer and his cohorts attempting to handle an unexpected visit from the show's new recurring antagonist, Agent Holly (Gary Cole), while dealing with the hot mess that is Pam--confines itself to one location as well: Cheryl/Carol/Cherlene's family's estate. When Archer's in swinging-door farce mode, the dialogue becomes even more rapid-fire than it already is, and "House Call" is full of many quotable bits during its rapid-fire exchanges. The episode also proves how much of a great creative decision Archer's recent transformation into "Archer Vice" has been. In "House Call," we see how Archer and Lana's career change from spies to drug dealers adds both comedic and dramatic tension to the kind of storyline a lot of sitcoms tend to whiff at when it's thrown at them and that Archer hopefully won't whiff at--the pregnancy storyline--and we also see how the presence of cocaine has given a new sense of purpose to several of the other characters, particularly Pam and Cyril.

Pam's gotten addicted to munching on cocaine cakes she's been making out of the new cartel's stash, and while she's lost some weight from the coke, it intensifies her She-Hulkish side and turns her into, as an impressed and mildly aroused Cheryl puts it, "Queen Kong." I liked Pam's brief phase as an ISIS agent in the field, but I think I like her "Queen Kong" phase even more, as long as it results in sight gags like my favorite one in "House Call," in which a tranq dart meant for the rampaging Pam lands in Malory's neck and an apparently immune Malory continues drinking her cocktail. Cyril, who finds his high not in eating blow or snorting it but in trotting out legalese, morphs from dorky accountant to dorky yet somehow badass attorney. Hearing Chris Parnell go toe-to-toe over legal procedure with the guy who used to voice Harvey Birdman made this former Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law viewer's day.

An episode of the old FX show Nip/Tuck introduced viewers to men who have a fetish for pregnant ladies, and Archer gets a similar introduction here to "preggo porn" in "House Call." Archer's reaction to preggo porn is the same one I had when I first caught that Nip/Tuck preggo fetish episode: "Oh, goddammit! That can't be a thing!" Hopefully, the sight of Archer faltering over its transformation into "Archer Vice" like Weeds did when it escaped from Agrestic won't become a thing either, as long as we wind up with solidly funny episodes like "House Call."

Memorable quotes:
* "I just don't want her to escape. You know how strong she is. Might as well be green and half-deaf."

* Cyril: "He can't come inside without a warrant... Well, unless you invite him in." Archer: "He's not a vampire, idiot. Plus it's daytime."

* Woodhouse: "I invited him in." Malory: "Woodhouse!" Holly: "And once you do that, you know, we are in. Not unlike vampires." Archer to Cyril: "See?"

* "How do you not know the different kinds of porn?" "Because I have sex with actual women, Cyril! My girlfriend's not equal parts the Internet, a tube of Kentucky jelly, self-loathing and a sock!"

* Archer to Lana, right after overhearing Holly shouting, "I'm a federal agent, and I'm coming! By God, I am coming!": "Are we not saying 'phrasing' anymore?"

* "What's this door made out of, mithril?"

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "White Elephant"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Adam Reed was just plain bored.

I love how that's the simple reason why Reed peaces out Archer's ISIS spy agency backdrop with FBI explosives and gunfire in "White Elephant," the ballsy and unsurprisingly hilarious fifth-season premiere of the animated show that's currently topping all other animated shows in terms of funny dialogue and cold opens (that balletic "White Elephant" cold open with no dialogue may be the show's best one yet). Reed is writing ISIS out of the show--tired of letting Malory Archer get away with murder as the corrupt head of ISIS, the government shuts down ISIS and sends special guest star Gary Cole and his Feds to arrest Malory and her agents--so beginning with "White Elephant," Sterling Archer, expectant mother Lana and Malory are no longer spies.

"I think probably all writers have the fear of repeating themselves over and over," explained Reed to the A.V. Club about why he's getting rid of ISIS this season. "It's sort of a way to hopefully make sure I'm not doing that. And also to keep people watching, so it didn't slowly turn into mission-of-the-week."

Last season was as consistently funny as previous seasons, but the spy storylines were beginning to feel a little rote to me, especially the feud between ISIS and Bionic Barry. I'm not surprised that Reed recently revealed he was starting to feel the same way too. We don't tune in to Archer because of the missions of the week. We tune in mainly for Reed's deranged characters and to see what sort of hilarity arises from hearing them ping-pong back and forth. Archer always worked better as a workplace comedy than a comedic spy show, so I'm not at all sorry to see the ISIS premise go because having Sterling, Lana and the rest stop pretending to be good guys and pursue criminal activity full-time to sell off Malory's secret stash of cocaine may end up being the best thing that's ever happened to this show.

Or it may not. Look what happened to Weeds when Jenji Kohan similarly took a flamethrower to her show's original premise after Nancy Botwin burnt Agrestic to the ground and took her family on the run across the continent or when the Conners won the lottery on Roseanne. Neither show was able to handle quite so well the changes in setting and concept. But I have faith in Archer's new season because all those clips of mayhem in the season 5 trailer that's badly disguised as Sterling's fantasy sequence about his new life in the drug game look very promising. Cheryl/Carol pursuing a country music career that's presumably funded by Sterling's new cartel? The sight of Lana in action as her baby bump expands? Pam getting high on her own supply and having to be taken down with dozens of tranquilizer darts like a grizzly bear? Plus Smokey and the Bandit car jumps too? Sign me up.

Memorable quotes:
* "Well, he died doing what he loved. Getting shot."

* Krieger, who's finally been added to the opening credits: "I'll be your doctor." Lana: "Well, if I want Hitler's DNA spliced into him, I'll give you a call." "Yeah, I'm around."

* Sterling, coming up with a Scrubs Med-esque name for the new cartel: "Archer Vice." Lana: "What?" Sterling: "Nothing. Shut up."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Shows of the Year 2013

Samurai Flamenco, "Capture Samumenco!"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," which was formerly called "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's time to look back at the biggest standouts of the episodes I discussed in 2013 (in chronological order). "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS. "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" returns on January 10.

Bob's Burgers, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" (from January 9, 2013)

It took me about a few episodes of Bob's Burgers to get used to the weirdness of female characters being voiced by male comedians (kind of like how a viewer who's never seen The Venture Bros. before catches TVB for the first time and keeps wondering, "Why does that brunette chick sound like a dude?"), but now that I'm no longer distracted by that casting quirk, I consider Bob's Burgers to be the current crown jewel of the Fox "Animation Domination" block. Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard has taken the best elements of his Squigglevision cartoons Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and Home Movies--overlapping dialogue, great comedic voice acting by performers who weren't previously associated with animation, nicely written kid characters--and put them into a show with top-shelf animation (no off-putting squiggling during this one).

Add to those elements a recurring and interesting art-vs.-commerce conflict between Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) and his business rivals that Bouchard has said was inspired by the 1996 Italian restaurant movie Big Night--plus timeless storylines that deal with the unspoken affection the family members have for each other without getting too goopy--and you have a cartoon that's outlasted the Allen Gregorys and Napoleon Dynamites of the world and, due to its timeless writing, has the potential to age better in reruns than Family Guy's random pop-culture reference gags and the equally reference-heavy and spotty later seasons of The Simpsons. "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" is a great example of the Bouchard show's exploration of the bonds between the Belchers without resorting to those sitcom hugging scenes that made '80s studio audiences go "Awww" and made me want to go shoot myself.

Written by Nora Smith, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" pairs off two characters who don't share a lot of scenes together--nine-year-old sociopath Louise (Kristen Schaal) and the parent she doesn't favor, the overly perky Linda (John Roberts, one of two male cast members on this show who voices females)--while continuing to explore how Louise's older sister Tina (Dan Mintz, the other actor playing female) seems to have inherited everything from Bob. Those attributes include a lonely and largely friendless childhood similar to the one we saw young Bob experience in "Bob Fires the Kids," Bob's calm demeanor and now, his hairiness.

At Dad's restaurant, Tina overhears a couple of popular classmates gossiping about another girl's hairy legs and realizes her own legs are equally hairy and susceptible to ridicule, so she asks Bob to take her to get her legs waxed after a couple of failed attempts to have them sheared. Lin was supposed to shave Tina's legs, but Lin, who's been fuming over Louise's frequent hostility towards her, is too distracted and angry to be entrusted with a razor, and as resident weirdo sibling Gene (Eugene Mirman) notes in one of the few observations of his that make any sense, "I don't think you should shave angry."

Lin's misguided solution to getting Louise to like her better is to trick her into taking part in a mother-daughter bonding seminar run by Lin's current favorite mommy blogger, "the Phenomimom," who turns out to be a creepy man named Dakota (Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) who holds his seminars next door to a laser-tag fun zone that's more to Louise's liking. Dakota's "Modo Time" methods of getting disgruntled kids to bond with their moms are, of course, pointless and ineffective. They range from lame role-reversal improv games to forcing the kids to re-experience their days as fetuses while trapped inside "vagi-sacks," a.k.a. sleeping bags.

Because Bob's Burgers is a very good cartoon as opposed to a sloppy one like The Simpsons' fake Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show that sets up the presence of a fireworks factory and then fails to utilize it as a gag, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" makes it to the fireworks factory when Louise frees herself and the other kids from their hellish seminar experience and leads them to escape to the laser-tag fun zone, where Louise and Lin finally end up bonding over laser guns aimed at an enraged Dakota. If this were The Young Ones, the anarchic Louise's love of destruction and criminal activity would make her Vyvyan. Between the attraction to laser-tag and her enjoyment of Bob's favorite spaghetti westerns in "Spaghetti Western and Meatballs," I wouldn't be surprised if this mini-Vyv grows up to become an action movie director, just like how Gene is bound to become either a hacky morning zoo DJ or a hacky stand-up and Tina is headed towards becoming either a chef like her dad or an essayist penning Paul Feig-esque best-sellers about her awkward adolescent experiences.

The kid characters are the best part of Bob's Burgers. That's mainly because they--particularly the nutty and over-enthusiastic Gene--talk and behave more like real kids who don't really know much about the world outside the restaurant and the playground and less like precocious Huey Freeman-style stand-ins or Mary Sues for their adult creators (although Aaron McGruder's use of Huey as the voice for his politics on the Boondocks cartoon works quite well for that show).

My favorite example in this episode of the Belcher kids being such kids--other than Gene's desire to get a scrotal wax despite not fully grasping how painful it likely is--is a quick gag that's easy to miss, and a lot of them can be easily missed due to the overlapping dialogue that's distinguished Bob's Burgers from The Simpsons and the Seth MacFarlane cartoons. When Louise tries to back out of mother-daughter time, she communicates to Lin her reluctance to spend time with her by using break-up lines she's overheard from either dozens of break-up conversations between couples at the restaurant or break-up scenes in rom-coms: "Look, I think we should spend some time apart. I'm just not really looking for something serious right now. You understand--I mean, yeah, it's gonna be a little awkward, you've got some of your stuff at my place, we live together..." "I think we should spend some time apart" are words I hope I'll never have to say to Bob's Burgers.

***

Archer, "Fugue and Riffs" (from January 23, 2013)

Episodes like "Fugue and Riffs," Archer's wildly funny and violent fourth-season premiere, are exactly why I wanted to expand "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" to include adult cartoons at the end of last year. "When the new year approaches," I asked myself, "do you want another year of sitting through Ben 10 reboots that cause your attention to wander or awfully written Ultimate Spider-Man episodes, or do you want to put that part of your time to better use, like covering adult cartoons that are more up your alley and are worthier of discussion and analysis?"

"Fugue and Riffs" is the kind of adult cartoon episode I should have been focusing on in the first place. It's another sharply written story involving ISIS agent Sterling Archer's ongoing conflict with his mother/boss Malory (Jessica Walter), and it contains a brilliant crossover with lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin's other current cartoon, more semi-nudity from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) and esoteric references that are funny simply because they're so damn esoteric (British spy hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon! Manning Coles, the duo that created Hambledon! The star of Shazam! Émile Zola!). You won't see Spidey cracking a joke that's a nod to Zola's "J'accuse" letter during Ultimate Spider-Man, that's for damn sure.

(Photo source: Brain Explosion)

The season premiere opens with Archer tending the grill at the exact same titular restaurant from Bob's Burgers, Benjamin's other show, while surrounded by the Belcher kids and Linda (John Roberts, the only Bob's Burgers voice actor reprising his role), who gets to berate Archer with one of the various insulting nicknames that have become one of the Adam Reed cartoon's trademarks ("Well, excuse me, Ike Turner!"). Instead of appearing in their more familiar character designs from Bob's Burgers, Tina, Gene, Louise and Linda are awesomely redesigned to blend in with Archer's '60s comic book aesthetic.

I like how the cold open strings us along into thinking Archer is undercover as a burger joint owner as part of some ISIS op, until it becomes clear that it's no op and he has no memory of his life as an ISIS agent, although a few pieces of that life remain. They include fighting skills, which Archer puts to use during a badass and extremely gory restaurant confrontation with KGB assassins straight out of A History of Violence, his literary tastes (he dubs the restaurant's newest burger "a Thomas Elphinstone Hambledurger with Manning Coleslaw") and his metrosexual side ("What I am gonna do is find out who this Archer jerk is... I'm also probably gonna do a spa weekend").

It turns out that two months ago, Archer developed amnesia due to a moment of extreme stress and ran away to a new life as a seaside fry cook named Bob. He married Linda and apparently became her second husband, which makes me wonder what happened to the original Bob in this universe (Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is dead?," and because much of this show's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if Linda has been remolding Archer Vertigo-style to look more like Bob). Both ISIS and the KGB are after Archer for different reasons: Malory assigns Lana, Cyril (Chris Parnell) and Ray (Reed) to stage a fake run-in with the KGB in front of Archer to try to jog his memory and get him back to the agency, while bionic villain Barry Dylan (Dave Willis) sends more KGB assassins to eliminate Archer.

Part of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" is trying to figure out the stressful moment that triggered Archer's amnesia. We're given a clue early on when Malory complains that her son hates seeing her be happy, and when the catalyst is revealed at the end to be neither a bomb explosion nor a Bourne Identity-style, ISIS-sanctioned attempt on his life, but something far less action-y--Malory's wedding to Ron Cadillac, the most successful Cadillac dealer in the Tri-State Area--it makes perfect sense within the neurotic, wracked-by-mommy-issues world of Archer. In a great bit of stunt-casting, the show has recruited Ron Leibman from The Hot Rock and Friends, as well as Walter's real-life husband, to voice Malory's new hubby, who's won over everyone at ISIS during Archer's two-month absence and whose presence this season is bound to reignite an old thread from a couple of seasons ago: Archer's search for his biological father. (Archer reportedly begins to form a bond with Ron in the new season's fourth episode. I can't wait to see if Reed, who's obsessed with the movies of one-time Archer guest star Burt Reynolds, will toss into that episode a reference to The Hot Rock or Leibman's other '70s crime-genre cult favorite, The Super Cops.)

The rest of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" involves being reacquainted with the elements that make Archer such an entertaining adult cartoon, from the batshit crazy behavior of Dr. Krieger (Lucky Yates) and office subordinates Pam (Amber Nash) and Cheryl/Carol (Judy Greer) to the self-satisfaction Archer gets from anything he does or says, particularly his esoteric jokes, as if he's a boy who just discovered cursing. Archer may be a competent, book-smart, sharply dressed and jet-setting spy with a sex life many of us Archer viewers would kill for, but deep down, he's really just a kid who never grew up and knows only how to be a narcissistic asshole, thanks to screwed-up parenting from an asshole of a parent. "Fugue and Riffs" reinforces Archer's childishness when he woo-hoos like a kid over the Molotov cocktails he and Lana lob at the assassins, or when one of Lana's attempts to get him to remember ISIS tanks and causes him to go off on a tangent about his love for Shazam!, which sometimes crossed over with the superheroine show The Secrets of Isis in the '70s--a nod to how this episode crosses over with Bob's Burgers.

No wonder Archer identifies so much with Shazam, née Captain Marvel, even in his fugue state. Shazam is a boy in a grown man's body, just like Archer.

***

Regular Show, "That's My Television" (from March 6, 2013)

Regular Show writers/storyboarders Madeline Queripel and Andres Salaff were responsible for one of the show's most unengaging shorts, this season's Fourth of July-related "Firework Run," a borderline racist episode that felt like a right-winger's worst nightmare about the Mexican gangster villains from Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy, even though Salaff himself is Latino (at the end of "Firework Run," the main heavy was revealed to have been a robot, perhaps a "Kim Jong Il is really an alien cockroach, so that's why we made his Engrish accent so cartoonishly thick"-style attempt to make the episode come off as less racist.) Queripel and Salaff also happen to be behind one of the show's best shorts, "That's My Television," an imaginative and wildly funny installment where Mordecai and Rigby come to the rescue of one of their favorite childhood TV stars, a talking TV set named RGB2 (Sam Marin), who's grown tired of showbiz and wants to flee to a much quieter life in a destination known as "Pine Mountain."

RGB2 starred as himself on the crappy '80s sitcom That's My Television, and a nameless TV network has brought back into production the still-popular show, which brings to mind every corny '80s housekeeper sitcom you've seen, whether it's Gimme a Break, Mr. Belvedere or TBS' ultra-cheesy Down to Earth (RGB2's signature catchphrase is "I hope you saved room for dessert!"). But RGB2--who needs to ingest cans of "'80s Air" a la Perri-Air from Spaceballs in order to survive--isn't enjoying a single minute of the revival, especially because the network is run by an intimidating exec who looks like Cartoon Network founder/owner Ted Turner (but doesn't sound like him at all and is voiced here by Jeff Bennett) and sends armed thugs in suits to threaten his stars if they don't do what he says.

At RGB2's Comic-Con-style meet-and-greet with his fans, Mordecai and Rigby win a drawing to receive That's My Television DVDs signed on the spot by RGB2 himself, and the star secretly pleads with the duo to help him escape to Pine Mountain. Mordecai and Rigby agree to help out their sitcom idol--it's not surprising that these slacker park workers identify with a domestic worker who frequently gets into comedic misunderstandings with the head of the household ("RGB2, room for dessert doesn't actually mean a whole room full of dessert!")--and their kind gesture sends Faux-Ted and his network thugs chasing after them in the most entertaining animated car chase I've seen in a while. Either Queripel or Salaff is enamored with both Casino Royale's badass airport tarmac stunt in which the jet wash of an incoming plane sends a police car flying through the air and the Guinness World Record-breaking Aston Martin cannon roll stunt from the same film because during the chase sequence, a couple of the network minions' Humvees are seen tumbling through the air in similar fashion.

RGB2 is clearly a riff on ALF, R2D2 and the dwarf actors who played them: Michu Meszaros sweated his balls off inside ALF's costume whenever a scene on ALF didn't call for the ALF puppet to be used, while R2 was operated by Kenny Baker, whose autograph adorns the liner notes of my CD copy of the expanded 1977 Star Wars soundtrack. The parallels to Meszaros and Baker are made plainly clear in the episode's nutty, disturbing and oddly affecting twist ending, when Mordecai and Rigby discover that RGB2 isn't a sentient TV set and has actually been a naked old actor inside the TV the whole time, which explains the need for '80s Air to help the poor guy breathe inside that damn TV. The dying man's destination turns out not to be a mountain but a billboard in the middle of nowhere for Pine Mountain Gas (presumably the gas station he either left behind to pursue stardom or was discovered at when the network was on the lookout for someone to operate RGB2).

Just like how this naked guy stayed hidden inside what was basically a mobile prison for over three decades, hidden within the '80s gags, the hilariously over-the-top car chase, the gunplay and the jabs at both focus group-driven TV and network exec jargon are serious questions about fandom, the pressures the public puts on TV stars and viewers' relationships with those stars and the TV industry--hence the double meaning of the title "That's My Television," which refers to both RGB2's show and people's attachment to the idiot box. The episode asks us to decide which kind of TV fan do we want to be by presenting two types of fans. Do we want to become so attached to TV that we degenerate into the mean and deranged middle-aged fangirl from RGB2's meet-and-greet who doesn't care for the well-being of a star like RGB2 and demands that he continue to entertain her even if the entertainer isn't happy or right in his mind or is endangering his own life by playing this character? Or do we want to be more like Mordecai and Rigby, who aren't as out-of-control in their fandom, are more understanding about RGB2's misery and are treating him more like a human being--even though for almost the entire episode, they think he's just a talking TV set?

"That's My Television" also questions whether it's worth it for performers like RGB2's portrayer to sacrifice a normal life--and their health--for fame and syndication money. Fortunately, the episode raises these questions without a single bit of speechifying and without trotting out Mordecai and Rigby after the episode to address the audience and deliver a moral like Filmation used to do with its characters. That's how terribly written most cartoons used to be back in the day. To borrow the words of one of the network thugs who get attacked by Mordecai, Rigby and RGB2 with weaponized cans of '80s Air, "Aw, sick! It smells like the '80s!"

Other memorable quotes:
* RGB2 defends himself with a rocket launcher: "It was a gift from the Russian Prime Minister! He loves the show!"

* "Bravo, gentlemen, bravo! Overall, that was a pretty nice PG getaway. Way to reach out to the 18-to-35 demographic. Oh, and nice third-act climax, by the way. The helicopter explosion really tied it all in with a cherry on top."

* "We just have a couple of notes for you. You see, our research groups have shown that nobody wants to see the good guys win anymore."

* The network exec threatens Mordecai, Rigby and RGB2 with his new, heavily armed and Poochie-like action star, who emerges on a skateboard: "Our focus group studied everything that boys ages nine to 14 find the most brutal and destructive!"

* "I'm not dead! I was just resting."

***

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, "Come Undone" (from April 10, 2013)

"Come Undone," the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated series finale, takes one of the most wack and least imaginative story resolutions in sci-fi, the reset button, and somehow makes it work, much like how Mystery Incorporated took a franchise that was entertaining only when you were a kid--and had become so unwatchable--and made it appealing again and genuinely dark and funny. The Mystery Incorporated team manages to defeat the Evil Entity, the previously imprisoned Anunnaki deity that's responsible for all the costumed criminals and evilness in Crystal Cove and has ended up consuming all of the town's inhabitants except for the detectives (in a series of scenes that are the darkest and bleakest this franchise has ever gotten and are therefore, awesome). Their triumph over the entity erases every trace of it from existence and creates a new timeline where Crystal Cove, "the Most Hauntedest Place on Earth," is now "the Sunniest Place on Earth" because the entity wasn't there to corrupt any of it.

Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby discover that their lives in this new timeline are perfect, and everyone who was previously killed off, including Velma's lesbian lover Marcy (let's face it, Linda Cardellini's reading of Marcy's last line in "Come Undone," "That's my girl," confirms it), is alive again. (Patrick Warburton's Sheriff Stone says the funniest line in "Come Undone," when he introduces his and Mayor Nettles' kids: "Now Eastwood, Norris and Little Billy Jack need to be asleep by eight. Lynda Carter here can stay up as long as she likes, on account of her being more adorable than her brothers.") But in a great turn of expectations, everyone in the team is dissatisfied with this timeline because there are no mysteries for them to solve.

Then here's where "Come Undone" cleverly handles the reset button: previous Mystery Incorporated guest star Harlan Ellison--the new Mr. E in this timeline and the only other person who knows of the changes the team made to the previous timeline because of his ability to see the events of alternate dimensions--contacts the detectives to let them know that he's enrolled them as students at his campus of Miskatonic University, the same setting from H.P. Lovecraft stories. At Miskatonic, there'll be plenty of mysteries for the team to solve, so in a brand new Mystery Machine they repaint after they destroyed the previous one earlier in the season, the detectives drive off to Miskatonic, perhaps encountering a few mysteries along the way, much like the ones they stumbled into while on the road back in the late '60s and early '70s. That means the entire run of Mystery Incorporated was basically a prequel to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

It's a brilliant way to end a cartoon that modernized Scooby and made it more like a Joss Whedon show by stocking it with snappy dialogue or in-jokes for older viewers (my favorite recent gag that no Cartoon Network viewer under 30 would understand was former MTV VJ Martha Quinn as herself, attempting to sell the detectives a bootleg of a Scritti Politti Christmas album that was recorded in Esperanto) and raising the stakes by building elaborate, apocalypse-related mythologies, which is interesting because Buffy affectionately borrowed from Scooby and nicknamed its central heroes the Scooby Gang. (Whedon regular Amy Acker even turned up on Mystery Incorporated and voiced the benevolent Anunnaki being who possessed Scooby's puppy girlfriend Nova.) The showrunner of the next animated Scooby incarnation should just give up. Whatever he has in mind for his iteration of those meddling kids is hardly going to be as good as Mystery Incorporated was.

***

American Dad, "The Missing Kink" (from April 17, 2013)

If there's any American Dad episode that I wish a group of radicals (much like the counter-protesters who came up with a bunch of brilliant ways to mock hateful protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con) would show in a screening room if they kidnapped the members of the Parents Television Council, strapped them down and forced them to watch some great comedic TV made for adults while subjecting them to some sort of Ludovico treatment-like experiment so that their heads would explode, and then they'd wind up catatonic so that they'd shut the fuck up and stop trying to ruin adult animation or adult sitcoms for everybody else, that episode would be "The Missing Kink."