Archer creator Adam Reed has a radical departure planned for the upcoming fifth season of the animated FX comedy. In an interview with Uproxx, one of the show’s producers, Matt Thompson, reveals that the new season, which debuts January 13th, will find Archer and his ISIS cohorts leaving spying behind to become cocaine dealers in a new city. Here’s how Thompson explained the big change:
That came about frankly because Adam got bored. He is the sole writer of the show and he felt like he was spinning his wheels at some point … You’re going to see in the very first episode of this season that all these years that Malory’s in control of ISIS, and they’ve been doing all these covert operations — kind of like the CIA or whatever — that that was never legal. She was just contracting out this stuff, kind of like Black Water or whatever, and in the first episode of the season the government comes in and shuts them down, throws them all in jail.
Check out more of Matt Thompson explaining Archer Season 5 changes below:
They eventually get out of jail but it’s with the understanding that they can never go back to ISIS headquarters. That’s been confiscated. They can never be spies again … At the very end of episode one, they realize from their various operations — for whatever reason — they have one ton of cocaine and they decide that they’re going to sell it. They’re just going to sell a ton of cocaine and everybody’s going to become a multi-millionaire and retire … As you might expect, they are not so successful at selling one ton of cocaine. We end up for a large part of the time in Colombia, then a fictional nation, then another fictional nation in Latin America, just trying to sell cocaine to people …Cheryl needed a different motivation than everybody else. Cheryl’s rich as shit … What Adam came up with is he wants to turn her into a country music star. So she is now “Cherlene.†She’s on the road. She’s doing country songs, and we’re actually putting out a country album with the show this year. Not a joke. A country album… [The] relationships all still exist how they were, but it’s just now all geared towards either A) Selling Coke or B) Making Cheryl Famous.