Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The creative team behind a popular U.S. animated spy series decided to replace an organization that played a key role in the story due to its name, ISIS, the Daily Beast news website reported.

The International Secret Intelligence Service, or ISIS, the organization to which the main characters belong to in the FX series Archer, will be replaced by an organization with a less notorious acronym, the CIA.

Archer’s ISIS shares the acronym of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a militant group that now controls large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria where they impose an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith.

The acronym was dropped stealthily, creator Adam Reed said.

“We quietly did,” Reed told The Daily Beast.

“We were waiting for it to go away—at least I was. Back in Season 5, FX said, ‘This might be a thing,’ and I thought, ‘Maybe it won’t be? Maybe it’ll be the mole that I’m gonna ignore and nothing will happen.’ We got sort of lucky and could organically make a merger with the CIA, so we went back and retroactively painted out the ISIS logos in parts of the show, and we just don’t talk about it in dialogue,” he explained.

Although already aired at a festival in the United States, creators edited the first episode of the show’s sixth season in which the ISIS sign in the Service’s building is seen being removed.

In the same episode, one character explains to another that the CIA is their new superior.

“It’s just the most awful thing, and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it. There were people online saying that we should address it and say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe these guys have co-opted our name.’ That’s the way South Park [another popular animated series in the U.S.] would do it, coming after them and saying, ‘These assholes stole our name,’ but that’s not the way the Archer universe works, where it’s all our own creations. In our universe, they don’t exist,” the show’s executive producer Matt Thompson said.

However, the shunned acronym is featured on several items of Archer merchandise such as mugs and caps.

“We have a lot of ISIS merchandise.’ So I guess that’s all going to a landfill somewhere,” Reed and and Thompson quoted the production company behind the as saying.


*Al Arabiya