Archer is a loveable rouge - an exceptional dicknuts that you love to hate and hate to love. He antagonises everyone close to him, including his an insanely pathological mother - and suffers from the mother of all mother complexes. Yet in spite of this, he almost always gets his own way: he's how you would behave if you thought you could get away with it, sans consequence. He rides the edge of his conscious and sub-conscious minds, constantly sipping drinks as he Freudian slips in and out of consciousness (Season 8 : Dreamland explores this dimension more fully], ever on the prowl for the exciting and the taboo. He never fully achieves self-consciousness - the awareness that he himself may have the problem - (except on rare occassions): it is always someone else: their fault, mistake or whatever. It is normally always his faultless mothers fault. This narcissistic trait is on the rise globally but Archer beat everyone to the front of the queue when they were handing out the means of disordering your personality: violent rampages, alcoholism and womanising are all his vices. And these make him who he is. If he awoke fully, he would not get the joke.
Archer- the show and the character- is a hypertextual construct, a Rorshach test, a fragmented mirror through which to view ourselves and our own fractured cultural and political landscape. It satirises, it plays with our prejudices, it explores the interstices and the intricacies of visual and spoken language as the sources of that great gift of humour. Archer is the navigator who guides us drunkenly through our own semi-lucid, partially-self-contained dream-states. If the medium is the message then the message is that Archer is us - all the characters are our own splintered personality, psychodynamically manifesting before our earballs; the more we interface with it, the more we observe the chattering and undermining of the differing aspects of our own selves; our bitter, bickering, berating and belittling superegos, which society half-assedly bestows upon us in our post-modern techno-fascist nightmare hellworld we call the 21st century. And then we laugh. Or drink. Or whatever. But definitely not cry. We laugh more. For, as Archer said to his own 6 month old baby: "Don't be such a baby!"; and as Malory says to every-idiot-else: "Don't be such an ass!"