In a so-called golden age of television, Riverdale is regarded by most of the internet as a blight on the Wednesday night lineup. Any time spent on Twitter or Tumblr will have you eventually stumbling across Riverdale quotes out of context—perhaps you’ve seen the one about “the epic highs and lows of high school football.” Or maybe you’ve heard about Archie surviving a bear attack. And almost anyone will recognize the reference to Jughead’s speech from season one if you say, “I’m weird, I’m a weirdo.” I was once part of the masses who laugh at Riverdale’s ridiculous dialogue and look down upon its predominantly teenaged fandom, either rabid over #Bughead or #Barchie (the two warring most popular Riverdale ships, Betty and Jughead or Betty and Archie, respectively). Riverdale fans often find themselves the internet’s laughingstock alongside the show to which they devote themselves. As someone who likes to think of herself as having Good Taste, I used to laugh along with the rest of the internet. After seeing a few random clips cross my Twitter timeline, I wrote off Riverdale as an insane teen drama with terribly written dialogue and bad acting. In fact, I tweeted in 2017: “If I ever watch [Riverdale] can someone shoot me.” (So I guess I should be expecting a visit from the Black Hood imminently. But I digress.) After falling victim to it after some convincing from my friends back in June 2020, figuring it would be fun to watch ironically during a pandemic when I didn’t have much else to do, I now wholeheartedly declare myself a fan of the show. I’m utterly convinced that society needs to change the way it looks at the Archie Comics reimagining.
For those who’ve never seen it, and even those of you who have, it may be hard to believe, but Riverdale is completely self-aware. It knows exactly how you feel about it. It knows just what it’s trying to do. It’s referential, clever, and yes, ridiculous. But all of this is on purpose. When you read it as a satire on the teen drama instead of a show that’s taking itself too seriously, Riverdale becomes genius. Unfortunately, most of the nuances of Riverdale are lost on its younger fanbase. When its most passionate audience has a fundamental misunderstanding of it as a show, Riverdale is bound to be even further mischaracterized by the general public who catch a few minutes here and there while flicking through the channels or see the clips of its most ridiculous moments plastered across their social media feeds. If you take Riverdale at face value, then of course it’s not going to look like a good show. It’s a teen drama taken to even more extreme lengths than usual. Yet that’s precisely what makes it work.
Most people are probably aware of the basic premise of Riverdale, but let me explain. Riverdale’s goal, seemingly, at its outset, was to be a gritty reimagining of Archie Comics for a modern audience. In an interview with The New York Times, Riverdale creator and showrunner and Archie Comics CCO Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa says that the original Archie Comics showed him a place “where everyone was basically nice and everyone was basically friends and everyone would go and have hamburgers every night and everyone would go to dances.” Aguirre-Sacasa himself, a gay Washington, D.C. native born to Nicaraguan parents, didn’t exactly belong in the overwhelmingly white, straight, all-American world of the original comics series. Aguirre-Sacasa’s Riverdale is home to a much more diverse cast of characters (not that Riverdale hasn’t faced its own share of rightful criticism when it comes to the show’s representation of marginalized characters, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article), purporting itself as a more progressive commentary on the state of small towns in America.
Season one’s driving plot is the mystery of the death of Jason Blossom. The wholesome characters your parents remember from their youth are now dealing with titillating subjects such as murder, affairs, sex, drugs and gangs. Archie still has to choose between Veronica and Betty (kind of), but the show is more focused on the corruption that runs through the small town of Riverdale (and, it follows, all small towns in America). Jughead is an angsty, pretentious writer who serves as the show’s narrator (and makes constant almost-nonsensical references to literature). Generational trauma and sins take center stage, and they are explored through the lens of contemporary teenhood. How do the youth of today deal with heavy, traumatizing events? How do we exit the idealism of our childhood? How can we navigate a world that is no longer what we thought it was? Riverdale answers these questions by taking its plots to extreme lengths, rendering them ridiculous (and unfailingly entertaining). It understands that young people cope with an ever-darkening world with humor, some denial, and most importantly, a concerning level of resilience (yes, a serial killer is going on an unchecked rampage through the town, but we have to put on a musical!).
As Riverdale progressed, it turned more towards the ridiculousness and campiness for which it’s now known, and it was completely self-aware about this development. While many former Riverdale watchers claim that it went downhill after its first season, I would argue that as Riverdale has gone on, it has further found its niche. Season 1, a tight 13-episode arc, is inarguably the neatest of the Riverdale seasons. But it’s also the least entertaining and has only scratched the surface of camp that the later seasons come to be known for. I mean, there’s not even a musical episode, which (controversially) I believe are where Riverdale is at its most fun. Despite the show’s inherent insanity, none of its messages would be effective if Riverdale didn’t also have its actors play their characters with earnestness and heart.
I care about these characters and I like to watch them go through life together despite the melodramatic and plot-driven nature of the show. While we laugh at their ample experience burying dead bodies, we also genuinely root for our heroes and wish to see them happy and successful. Riverdale walks a fine line between being genuine and being satirical, and it’s this ineffable quality that makes the show so fun to watch for a savvy viewer who’s also willing to suspend their disbelief and be taken on a ride. Watching Betty fight the darkness inside her (literally inscribed on her DNA as the “serial killer gene”) is a purposefully ludicrous allegory for the concern a lot of young people have about turning into their parents, inheriting the worst parts of their elders in unavoidable and legible ways. This may sound like I’m overanalyzing, but I’m not. Every clowned-on plotline serves a purpose in Riverdale, even if the purpose is simply to be hilarious and entertaining. Poor Kevin has been sucked into too many cults, but can’t that be seen as a commentary on how those on the margins of society are more vulnerable to cult recruitment tactics?
In perhaps one of the show’s finest episodes, Season 4 Episode 19: Killing Mr. Honey, the teens are outraged because their new principal wants to cancel prom, citing student deaths in previous years as a reason to halt the festivities. Their teenage psyches see the cancellation of prom as the worst thing that could happen to them, and they protest this decision more than they protested the organ-harvesting cult’s involvement in the production of their school musical last year. Our heroes are in Mr. Honey’s office every day, getting their parents involved, and generally causing a huge ruckus for their right to have this classic American high school experience. Mr. Honey tells the teens, “These things, murder, mayhem, depravity, they’re not normal.” In a self-reflexive bit of dialogue, Betty responds, “Well, they’re normal to us.” Riverdale can’t be anything but completely self-aware about the positions it’s putting these characters into, corrupting the unblemished image of the Archie Comics of yore. And it’s in this corruption that it not only creates totally original storylines, unforgettable in their extremity, but that it becomes a show about trauma, the disintegration of the American dream and the increasingly complicated and dark world that teenagers navigate the only ways they know how. So perhaps it’s time to stop baselessly criticizing Riverdale because it’s what everyone else is doing. Subvert cultural norms, invite some camp into your life and enjoy Archie escaping from the juvenile detention center only to get attacked by a bear in the Canadian wilderness with us Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa devotees.