Lana Kane

Lana Kane is ISIS's most competent field agent, which mostly means playing the exasperated straight woman to Sterling Archer's chaos. She's sharp, principled (relatively speaking, for a spy agency this crooked), and permanently unimpressed by the man she used to date. She wants missions to go well and Archer to shut up; she rarely gets either.

Aisha Tyler plays the deadpan center of a show built to spin out of control, and that contrast is the joke: her exhausted competence against everyone else's gleeful incompetence. She gets real skill, real anger, and real timing rather than just reaction shots, which is why she never reads as merely the one sane person in the room.