Sterling Archer

Sterling Archer is the top field agent at ISIS, a spy agency his mother runs, and he never lets anyone forget it. Vain, drunk, and reflexively cruel to everyone around him, he swaggers through missions more concerned with his tuxedo, his vodka intake, and being called 'Duchess' than actual espionage. He wants admiration, mostly his mother's.

H. Jon Benjamin's flat, deadpan delivery is the whole engine: the more catastrophic the situation, the more bored and put-upon Archer sounds, and that mismatch is where the laughs live. The writing never lets his monstrous self-regard soften into likability, yet keeps him so gloriously petty and quotable that you root for him anyway.