FX doubles the Monday antics

In Chozen, the FX animated comedy series about a gay ex-con rapper that premieres at 10:30 Monday night, an obtuse MC is performing a crude song full of drug references and racial stereotypes before a dinner theater gathering of the Philippines Family Association.

The performance, which includes the band's manager appearing on stage in a Chinese dragon headdress, does not go over well anywhere except in the minds of the performer and his multicultural crew. Afterward, the manager, who doubles as a paparazzo sleaze, cheerily announces, "A few more shows, a couple of demos, and we'll be on the road to the Grammys."

"The Grammys!" Chozen, who is voiced by Saturday Night Live comic Bobby Moynihan, replies incredulously that nobody cares about the Grammys, "except white people and Kanye West."

The joke is funny in part because Chozen is described by the show's producers as having the "lyrical ability of a Renaissance poet, the sexual drive of Wilt Chamberlain and Liberace combined, and a will to succeed that would put Donald Trump to shame." Chozen is the creation of Grant Dekernion, formerly with the ribald HBO comedy Eastbound & Down, whose star, Danny McBride, is one of Chozen's executive producers.

While crashing on the couch and ruining the life of his college-sophomore little sister, Tracy (Kathryn Hahn), Chozen is also on a quest to take revenge on Phantasm, the blond African American rapper who set him up and sent him to prison. Phantasm, now rich as Croesus on top of the rap pack, is voiced by the Wu Tang Clan member who now bills himself as Cliff "Method Man" Smith.

The presence of the rapper-actor, who also had recurring roles on HBO's Oz and The Wire, is a signal that although Chozen sends up macho hip-hop cliches, it also gets the details right. The songs, which are written by Dekernion, are typically sharp, funny, and well produced. Phantasm gets his braggadocio on by rhyming: "Kill yourself, I'm better than you / If I die one day, I'll be deader than you."

In FX's TV-MA animated doubleheader, in which giddily immature humor is aimed at "mature audiences," Chozen is on after spy-spoof hit Archer, which makes its season debut at 10 p.m. Now in its fifth season, the show, written by Adam Reed, gets a makeover as Archer Vice. The change is a playful nod to the principal plot line in which Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin), his mother, Malory (Jessica Walter), now-pregnant ex-girlfriend, Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), and other members of espionage agency ISIS now find themselves both bankrupt and in possession of copious amounts of cocaine.

That leads the band of backstabbing self-interested super spies with no other recourse, as they see it, than to start their own drug cartel. They make their way from New York to Miami, where clueless clotheshorse Sterling Archer can dress up in Sonny Crockett pastels and pinks while Lana is forced to clean up his mess as she brings her pregnancy to term.

The madcap vulgarity continues apace. Gluttonous human resources director Pam Poovey (Amber Nash) can't resist eating the body cast made of cocaine she has been fitted into for smuggling purposes. Billionairess secretary Cheryl Tunt (Judy Greer) is intent on becoming a Shania Twain-style country star, although she can sing on key only when no one's listening. Archer's musical diversions, like Chozen's, are more than reputably brought off.

And if savvy social-media moves such as having cast members post nude selfies on Reddit, as they did last week, weren't amusing enough, an Archer Vice country album is in the works. That will come with a twangified version of "Danger Zone," Sterling Archer's favorite Kenny Loggins song, which provides the action-hero montage music for that place where the incompetent but still somehow not-yet-dead Archer spies so often find themselves.

Archer

10 p.m., Monday, FX

Chozen

10:30 p.m., Monday, FX

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