Sterling Archer finally woke up from that three-season-long coma at the very end of the (excellent) 10th season of the FXX animated comedy series “Archer,” but what that actually meant for things in the show’s real world has been a mystery — until now anyway, thanks to the first trailer for “Archer” Season 11, which dropped today during the show’s Comic-Con@Home panel. Watch it above.
First, a quick catch-up: At the end of Season 7 all the way back in 2016, Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) was shot several times and left for dead, floating face down in a pool. Season 8, called “Archer: Dreamland,” revealed that he survived but had been in a coma for three months, and the season’s plot — a 1940s noir parody with the show’s cast playing completely different bio-totally same personality characters — was actually just Archer’s coma dream.
That conceit continued into 2018’s “Danger Island,” a pulp serial pastiche set on a tropical island in the 1930s, and last year’s “Archer: 1999,” a science fiction parody. But as we mentioned, Archer finally woke up at the end of “1999,” and as the trailer makes clear, the years that have passed IRL since “Dreamland” have also passed in the show’s universe. Archer’s coma lasted three years, he has a LONG way to go before he fully recovers from the ordeal, and his co-workers have all moved on and, in a lot of ways, become dramatically better people.
Will it last? Of course not, Archer’s influence will definitely undo everyone’s self-improvement. But the upshot is that the show’s original, long-since-discared premise — it’s a spy movie parody set in a private sector for-profit spy agency — is back, baby!
Along with Benjamin, the show stars Aisha Tyler as Lana Kane, Jessica Walter as Archer’s mother Malory, Judy Greer as Cheryl/Carol Tunt, Chris Parnell as Cyril Figgis, Amber Nash as Pam Poovey, Adam Reed as Ray Gillette, and Lucky Yates as Algernop Krieger. “Archer” Season 11 premieres Sept. 16 on FXX.
TheWrap is spending the week with Comic-Con@Home — check out all of our ongoing coverage here.