MATT THOMPSON: I don’t know if it’s the best place to go next, but it’s what interested us. Kind of the long-ish route to get there, but it’s a world that we hope has consequences—even though it’s animated. What I mean by that is that in Sealab we just blew the whole place up at the end of every other episode and killed everybody.

In our next show, Frisky Dingo, people would be blind for a few episodes maybe, and then un-blinded, but never die. And then with this show, the rules just keep getting more and more realistic. We really loved how we ended last season by faking everybody out. They all thought it was going to be this Archer robot that gets shot, but nope, it’s really him! And so we wanted to make sure that that had a consequence. We didn’t want it to be like, “Hey, remember when you almost died? Let’s go get those bad guys!” We wanted it to have weight, so the best way to do that it seemed was to put him in a coma. So then what does that mean? Is it just going to be one episode where he’s in a coma, wakes up, and miraculously moves on? No, that just feels so normal. What would be more interesting would be to do anything we wanted, so let’s do a season entirely in Archer’s mind.

So we boiled it all down. Even when it was spies, or cocaine, or anything else, at its essence it’s really a detective game for these people. It’s a film noir homage going on in this action-comedy workplace. So it made sense for us to go right at film noir because—and this is a Hollywood word that I hate—but there are tent poles, which are structurally integral to our show.

So those things existed and made it a nice easy transition to make here. It also allowed us to make the show look even more beautiful here. I will say that when we first had the idea, Adam and I were fighting over who would have to tell FXX, “Okay, we want to do a season in 1947,” but then we wanted to go one step further and Adam was like, “I want to tell them we should do it in black and white.” Oh God! You can’t do that. 1947 is already so much of a jump. That was the original, original plan though, to do it in black and white. But we never even told FXX. To their credit, they probably would have even gone with it! They’re all about pushing boundaries. If you’re going to swing, swing hard.

That’s a really cool idea though and now’s the time that there’s actually an audience for that. You should at least try to get it going for the DVD.