Welcome to the first Moments of Joy for 2011! It’s a whole new year, and so far, it’s been a very cold one. We don’t care for it one bit, frankly. Luckily, while we’ve been huddled up under our Snuggies and Slankets, some of our favorite shows have come back from the holiday break. And one of our very favorites started to leak into the real world, which is both exciting and terrifying. We don’t want our favorite chicken restaurant to be hit by a meteor!
So what made us happy on TV this week? Archer – No, the new season of FX’s animated espionage comedy hasn’t started yet. But the Season One DVD’s just came out, and they included a bonus feature that we absolutely loved. The packaging advertises the inclusion of the “Original Unaired Pilot”, so naturally that was the first thing we checked out. *SPOILER WARNING* — Skip down to the next entry if you don’t want us to spoil the joke for you. We’ll be waiting down there. OK, the unaired pilot begins with a title card saying that originally a different actor was cast as Sterling Archer, but the network thought he skewed too old. What follows is the pilot episode, though Archer is replaced in every shot by a velociraptor, and his dialogue is replaced by roars and hisses. Everything else is unchanged, including the other characters’ reactions to Archer’s lines. It’s a goofy joke, and they commit to it by carrying it off for the entire episode. (Yes, we watched the whole thing.) And remember, Season Two starts on January 27!
