Come January during the sixth season premiere of “Archer,” the show’s central spy agency will no longer be called ISIS.
The creators of the hit FX animated show have eliminated all use of the acronym, which stands for the International Secret Intelligence Service — the name of the show’s underground spy organization — as it’s become increasingly associated with the jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
According to The Daily Beast, the season opener shows movers rolling out the circular blue ISIS sign that has been a prominent part of the show’s New York City setting for the past five seasons. The pivotal scene and following dialogue between Malory Archer (Jessica Walter) and her son Sterling (H. Jon Benjamin) — explaining that they now work for the CIA — was added after the original version of the episode screened at San Diego Comic-Con.
“We were waiting for it to go away — at least I was,” creator Adam Reedtold The Daily Beast. “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.”
However, they didn’t remove the logo or mentions of ISIS from previous seasons of the show.
“We won’t say ISIS anymore, and the only visual representation of it will be that sign rolling off the show,” exec producer Matt Thompson told The Daily Beast. “It’s just the most awful thing, and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
The creators of the hit FX animated show have eliminated all use of the acronym, which stands for the International Secret Intelligence Service — the name of the show’s underground spy organization — as it’s become increasingly associated with the jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
According to The Daily Beast, the season opener shows movers rolling out the circular blue ISIS sign that has been a prominent part of the show’s New York City setting for the past five seasons. The pivotal scene and following dialogue between Malory Archer (Jessica Walter) and her son Sterling (H. Jon Benjamin) — explaining that they now work for the CIA — was added after the original version of the episode screened at San Diego Comic-Con.
“We were waiting for it to go away — at least I was,” creator Adam Reedtold The Daily Beast. “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.”
However, they didn’t remove the logo or mentions of ISIS from previous seasons of the show.
“We won’t say ISIS anymore, and the only visual representation of it will be that sign rolling off the show,” exec producer Matt Thompson told The Daily Beast. “It’s just the most awful thing, and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
