With building blocks this strong, Archer can blow itself up as often as it likes

Archer creator Adam Reed pulled a fast one (are we still doing “phrasing”?) on Comic-Con attendees in 2015, announcing that a “refresh” had delayed the animated comedy’s seventh season, necessitating the creation of new wardrobe, new weapons, and new surroundings for the spies-turned-drug-dealers-turned-CIA-contractors formerly known as ISIS. When it comes to the air on March 31, that refresh finds Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) and company freshly blacklisted by Central Intelligence and setting up shop as private investigators in Los Angeles, a scenario established with the blend of breezy exposition and vigorous tongue lashings (seriously, are we not doing phrasing anymore?) that have become customary for fresh rounds of Archer. It’s a good look for the show, whose weekly missions have always had a whiff of Stephen J. Cannell to them—and which now walks the same beat as another TV dick known for collecting aggrieved voice messages.
It’s also definitive proof of Archer’s unique versatility, upping the ante previously set by Archer Vice’s adventures in cocaine trafficking. Like that season, the characters’ morally compromised baseline eases the transition into non-espionage work. “A good detective and a good spy share a lot of skills,” Malory Archer (Jessica Walter) says midway through the season premiere, and the qualities that made Archer an uproarious secret-agent sendup make the new season a hilarious treatment of primetime PIs from the ’70s and ’80s. (Dig the throwback musical stings and Technicolor silhouettes marking the act breaks!) But the new setup is also an opportunity for the employees of The Figgis Agency—a distinction that causes the Archers no uncertain amount of grief—to make themselves over. It’s nothing quite so drastic as the season-five makeover that thrust Cheryl (Judy Greer) into the country-music spotlight—it’s more like Cyril (Chris Parnell) adapting (poorly) to a position of authority in the office.