Archer creator Adam Reed and executive producer Matt Thompson explained at NYCC that they have decided to remove ‘ISIS’ (International Secret Intelligence Service) from the show.
The clip shown during the panel shows Malory Archer (Jessica Walter) speaking on the phone with Sterling Archer. In the background, you see two movers rolling out a large, circular blue ISIS sign.
“We quietly did,” Reed told The Daily Beast. “We were waiting for it to go away—at least I was. Back in Season 5, FX said, ‘This might be a thing,’ and I thought, ‘Maybe it won’t be? Maybe it’ll be the mole that I’m gonna ignore and nothing will happen.’ We got sort of lucky and could organically make a merger with the CIA, so we went back and retroactively painted out the ISIS logos in parts of the show, and we just don’t talk about it in dialogue. It’s just the most awful thing, and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it… We won’t say ISIS anymore, and the only visual representation of it will be that sign rolling off the show,” said exec producer Thompson. “It’s just the most awful thing, and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it. There were people online saying that we should address it and say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe these guys have co-opted our name.’ That’s the way South Park would do it, coming after them and saying, ‘These assholes stole our name,’ but that’s not the way the Archer universe works, where it’s all our own creations. In our universe, they don’t exist.”
Archer returns in January 2015.
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