“I know it’s impossible, but I wish we could stay in Riverdale forever – just stay the same with all our friends: young, beautiful, full of hope,” says Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart’s) in the 137th and final episode of Riverdale. He’s either 18 or 86 years old when these words are uttered, and the action takes place either in 1957 or in 2023 – here’s how to look. We will look at it in the second way: the numbers come out very well.
Let’s go back 20 years, following the series example, to Atlanta in 2003. There, playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, 30, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and the son of the Nicaraguan foreign minister, looks forward to the premiere of Archie’s Strange Fantasies. In the making, Archie Andrews, a simple American boy, the protagonist of the legendary comic book published by Archie Comics, confesses his homosexuality and moves from his hometown of Riverdale to New York. But Aguirre-Sacasa’s performance was not destined to come to light in this form: on the eve of the first performance, the publishing house threatened to sue the authors. Archie Comics feared that portraying Archie as gay would “weaken and tarnish his image.” A few days after that, they presented the “Weird Comic Book Fantasy” game in Atlanta where everything was the same but Archie and Riverdale were no longer mentioned.
The infamous end of Archie’s Bizarre Fantasies was only the beginning. 10 years later, these characters are still in the hands of the game’s creator – and quite legally already. In 2013, Aguirre-Sacasa wrote two hits for Archie Comics: “Archie Meets Glee” (a crossover with Ryan Murphy’s “Glee” series, for which Aguirre-Sacasa worked as a screenwriter) and the horror series “Afterlife with Archie”. In the latter, Riverdale faced a full-fledged zombie apocalypse due to an error in the (same) prophecy of the young witch Sabrina. The comics were a huge success, and a year later Aguirre-Sacas was appointed creative director of Archie Comics.
And Riverdale, which he launched in 2017, made his debut on The CW. Until then, no one was particularly concerned about weakening and staining anything.
“Television movies aren’t life,” Tim said when, for no reason, he decided to get off the plane and head north.
“It’s a shame,” said Kalisha. – I love Riverdale.
Such dialogue can be found at the end of Stephen King’s sci-fi novel The Institute, published in 2019. At the bottom of the page is a footnote: “An American youth television series in which children explore the dark mysteries of their city.” By “men” we mean the aforementioned Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge. (Camila Mendes)) and Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse).
It would seem, where is Stephen King’s sci-fi and where is the CW’s teen drama? Not much of a surprise, actually: Everyone eventually learned about Twin Peaks for Teens, the Netflix streaming even began distributing it under the Originals brand, and Riverdale itself, which started out as a humble school drama with at times detective action, has gone into point sci-fi. But first things first.
Playing with the mundane problems of high school students, Riverdale began to derail right in the finale of the first season. This is Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) goes to the restaurant “At the Pope” as usual, but a cozy family dinner with his father is clouded by a terrible tragedy: a terrible man in black wool shoots Archie’s father with a pistol.
Five months after this scene, a completely different series was broadcast again. It turns out that a scary man with black wool is a serial killer named “Black Hood”. It’s the first of a fairly long series of serial killers that the people of Riverdale will face over the next six seasons. It later turns out that bloodthirsty cults (and two at once), biker gangs, tough nuns, and dangerous gangsters peacefully coexist in this town, and schoolchildren can survive hand-to-hand fights with bears and become prison champions. underground fights, public speaking bars and jewelry stores, department stores, cinemas – and further down the list. The same students graduate from school twice because at one point they travel back in time – after a giant comet crashed on Riverdale. Despite gaining superpowers and with the help of alternate versions from parallel dimensions, the heroes do not stop.
Some craziness has never been foreign to CW projects, like the scene in One Tree Hill where a dog plays the organ that belonged to one of the characters, whose heart was left on the hospital corridor floor. But the writers of Riverdale, led by Aguirre-Sacasa, seem to have reached absolute heights in this field. The show only at first glance seems like a complete hack (although many continue to stubbornly reprimand him for nonsense) – here it soon becomes clear that all possible rules of dramaturgy and storytelling are violated quite deliberately. There are no rules here.
As a result, Riverdale turns into an extremely exciting show: Literally anything can happen here at any time.
A crowd of enraged nuns will run around the corner, the cult leader will shoot himself with a huge gun and try to hide from the FBI, one of the schoolgirls will transform into Uncut Gems’ hero Adam Sandler and the other into Clarissa Starling. From The Silence of the Lambs. Bear again.
“Somehow Palpatine is back!” If you need a sentence like this, it means there is a problem with your story. If there are several Palpatines returning in each episode, the plot is in principle of little importance, the narrative giving way to shock. This is great art and a choice the audience should reckon with.
Riverdale is a caps lock series mixed with emoji. It’s amazing how anyone who’s been involved in this business for six years has gotten away with it.
It’s amazing how amid this chaos the characters manage to bond so strongly (the series is fully aware of its emotional charge – and it throws it all at once in the final episode, forcing the last 45 minutes to sit with wet eyes, sometimes sob).
It’s hard to say how things would have turned out if Archie Comics had let Aguirre-Sacasa’s stage banter continue (though in a way, that’s exactly what he did). Maybe there would be no such thing as Twin Peaks for teenagers, and the most famous comic book adaptation of the Archie universe would remain Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the Showtime comedy starring Melissa Joan-Hart. We won’t know. What I do know is that it’s impossible, but I wish we could stay in Riverdale forever.