Men aged 18 to 34 aren’t a monolithic group, and neither is the television programming intended to capture their demographic. Although one wonders if that’s merely an accident, witnessing the pandering nature of so much action, comedy, and whatever-“Tosh.0”-is programming. Just today Vulture provides a troublesome but entirely unsurprising supercut of rape jokes from this season’s sitcoms. Writer Margaret Lyons nicely explains the problem with these gags, beyond their obvious political incorrectness, saying the “jokes are by and large just shorthand for outrageousness, a go-to vocabulary to create a patina of audacity without actually saying anything important, or even funny.” They are, in other words, a leading example of deeply lazy sitcom writing.
Lazy writing isn’t all that’s wrong with television that panders to men, of course. “Family Guy,” for instance — a classic that brought a whole new level of comic timing to TV and takes genuine risks, surprising as often as it “shocks” — routinely plays violence against women for laughs. (To cite even a short list of these offenses would be too wearying, but we will advise you to skip the episode, “Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q,” in which Quagmire’s sister comes to visit with her abusive boyfriend in tow.)
The writing on “Archer,” the animated Bond sendup that resumed its second third season on FX last night, is never lazy. And although the show’s probably not above lobbing out a rape joke (we don’t remember any from before, but as Vulture has shown, rape jokes are weirdly unmemorable, right?), it focuses on its characters and degrading them specifically, rather than using them as mouthpieces for overly broad humor. So on last night’s episode you had Pam, the spy agency’s horny, chunky administrator, glimpsing a picture of Burt Reynolds (who guest-starred as himself) and saying, “I swear to god you could drown a toddler in my panties right now!” Or Ray, the gay agent who was paralyzed last season, left dangling on a van’s slow-moving wheelchair lift in the middle of a firefight. Gags like this have the tang of the politically incorrect, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being offended by them. And more importantly, they’re pretty funny.
“Archer” is by most measures a classy program, with terrific voice acting, beautiful animation, and a developing story arc (cf. Ray’s paralysis). And while the show is very much about jokes concerning the drowning of babies in vaginal fluids and centers around a lovably selfish, even savage, alpha male, it does a better job of most likeminded fare in (self-consciously) giving its female characters what a grad instructor might call “agency,” and driving home the alpha male’s motivating insecurities. It’s as much a satire of bad TV for men as it is spy movies — a pretty neat trick for a cartoon that has to wring laughs from a line like, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my giant, throbbing erection.”