‘Archer’ Will End After Season 10

(Season seven spoilers ahead, in case you’re a jerk and haven’t watched yet.)

The season seven finale of FX’s Emmy-winning animated series Archer left a lot of fans wondering if the worst actually happened. Is Sterling Archer, the world’s greatest super spy, dead? He can’t be, right? There has to be some sort of over-the-top cyborg explanation waiting for us in the season eight premiere, or else what would even be the point of watching anymore. (Obviously, we’d still watch for the sake of Pam, Lana, Cyril, Cheryl, Mallory, and especially Dr. Krieger, but we’d really miss Sterling.)

Fortunately, we already knew that Archer creator Adam Reed “killed” his titular spy because, at the time, FX had yet to renew the series. “FX hasn’t picked the show up yet,” he told the Daily Beast in June. “We don’t know. Archer might be dead. We have some ideas, but you know, it’s very much sitting right there. That could be it.” And then, of course, the show was renewed for another three seasons before the cast and crew celebrated a huge Emmy win. So, it’s all good news, right? For now, yes.

Last week, Reed appeared on the Modern School of Film’s Murmur podcast and let us know when we can brace for life without Archer.

The plan is to end Archer after season 10. I don’t know that anybody has talked about that, but that is definitely my plan – to do 8, 9, and 10 and they’re gonna be each shorter seasons of just eight episodes – and then wind it up. … I was gonna end it after 8, but then I had sort of a brain explosion of a way that I could do three more seasons and really keep my interest up. So the three seasons that are coming up are gonna be pretty different from what has come before, and they’re gonna be different from each other. (Via Splitsider)

As we know from speaking with Reed and his cohorts in the past, he knows exactly how he wants to begin and end each season when he starts the creative process. So, if he says that he had a “brain explosion,” then we can sure as hell expect for the three remaining seasons of Archer to be funnier, raunchier, deadlier, and probably even more diabolically brilliant than anything we’ve ever seen before. And that’s a wonderful thing to think about until season eight begins.

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