Six and a half years ago, the CW filled a hole in its midyear programming schedule with a series that sounded like a parody of industry trends. “A gritty, supernaturally tinged, firmly PG-13 reimagining of the Archie Comics mythos” was the clearest way to describe Riverdale to those incredulous about its existence. The smiley-faced comic-book icons Betty, Veronica and Jughead had been turned into telegenic twentysomething teens with county-sized libidos in a show that was also a sprawling soap opera with a liberated relationship to reality, the finest specimen of its genre in its era.
Archie did much more than share a steamy car hookup with his teacher Miss Grundy in the pilot. Over the six-season broadcast run concluding with this Wednesday’s finale, members of the good-time gang went to war, escaped from a derelict mental asylum, traveled through time, hopped across multiple dimensions, braved the treacherous terrain of undergrad creative writing seminars, developed and kicked drug addiction, maneuvered through corporate espionage, staged multiple musicals, joined the FBI, made the acquaintance of Andy Cohen, and learned to appreciate the epic highs and lows of high-school football. The mission drift from the first season’s purview of classroom intrigue blossomed into an absurd running joke, with life-and-death, fate-of-the-planet stakes often contrasted against despair over unrequited crushes or stress about prom. Cheryl Blossom arrived on the scene as the one-liner-spitting queen bee at Riverdale high, spent a while as a Grey Gardens-style shut-in, pivoted to a sapphic demi-deity, and will soon end her arc as the leader of an all-girl squad of greasers circa 1955.
There’s no such thing as going over the top on Riverdale, a show that rejected the basic notion of a top as it kept rising up and up into the stratosphere of lunacy. From one week to the next, it barely adhered to its own topsy-turvy sense of internal logic, freely disposing of characters or subplots whenever they might get in the way of the next reinvention. The haphazard structuring sometimes stagnated the momentum of a season (and called attention to how few hourlong series still run for 22 episodes at a time), but whatever its missteps, the unending parade of camp never once committed the cardinal sin of being boring. Whenever the action threatened to slow down, the staffers would just introduce some new twist or non sequitur plot device. The similarly excessive, queer-inflected American Horror Story has illustrated the difficulty of sustaining an outrageous standard, and that was with the anthological benefit of an annual reset; Riverdale stayed lively by finding pleasure in its own preposterousness. Where Ryan Murphy believes in and craves prestige, the showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa staunchly refuses to take his work seriously, venturing deeper into his insular funhouse with the express purpose of getting lost.
Not since the Dubya-years heyday of the original Gossip Girl has television bore witness to dialogue like this, a pidgin language of baroque purple prose, Charles Nelson Reilly-level innuendo, eclectic pop culture allusions and youth-geared online-native slang. (Cardi B threatens to “dog walk” Tomi Lahren on Twitter, and three months later, the phrase comes out of Veronica’s mouth, probably appended by her trademark utterance of “daddy”.) The distinct manner of speech made the program a perennial laughingstock on social media, its juiciest soundbites posted without context for the gawking masses. A lot of the derision stemmed from the misconception that Aguirre-Sacasa had attempted to make a normal TV show and failed, where in actuality he had set out to create something bizarre, uninhibited and specific to great success.
Rather than whipping spaghetti at the wall and going with whatever stuck, the writers adhered to a set of references that only seemed haphazard to viewers unfamiliar with the show’s chosen sector of gay kitsch. So much included within this grab bag of eras and styles – jocks in gym shorts, prima donnas dropping bon mots, bouts of bodice-ripper passion, leather-clad packs of street toughs in tight jeans, strapping army men with square jaws, one character’s brief dalliance with cruising around the town’s local Ramble – can be traced back to early-20th-century pulp fiction and specifically boys’ mags. Aguirre-Sacasa’s fascination with these pockets of cultural detritus also comes through in his emulation of fellow artists bewitched by the frisky underside of Americana, chief among them David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks guided Riverdale as a thematic and aesthetic north star. Some even came out to play; the underground film-making legend Gregg Araki dropped in to direct one episode.
As the years rolled by, the show’s main weakness became its regard for an implacable audience fixated on “ships” and which couples would be “endgame”, leading to tail-wags-dog situations that came closest to verging on tedium in an otherwise eventful run. This Wednesday’s finale will assuredly attend to the question of who gets to live happily ever after with whom, though that self-reflexivity also led to the penultimate installment’s brain-breaking, ouroboric emotional climax in which the characters watch the entirety of Riverdale in-universe to cure their magic amnesia. (Don’t worry about it.) Folding in on itself feels like an appropriate way to go after 136 hours spent testing the tensile strength of storytelling, bending suspension of disbelief just far enough to strain without fully breaking.
For as long as it has graced the airwaves, Riverdale has been subject to feeble efforts to discern whether it is good or bad, mostly to the detriment of its reputation. This conundrum is resolved easily enough – it’s very, very good at being “bad” – but it speaks to a blinkered view of entertainment that could continue to nag at this future cult object’s legacy. To complain that the show in which Chad Michael Murray cameos as an Evel Knievel-suited cult leader trying to ascend from the planet in a rocket doesn’t make sense would be to miss the point. Does a beautiful day need to “make sense”, or the embrace of a lover? Or, perhaps more relevantly, simpatico soap parodies like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman? The narrative inconsistencies, the constant backtracking, and the abruptness all coalesced into a house style. Nothing can stay this funny for this long by accident. Even when it threatened to careen off the rails at any moment, Riverdale always knew what it was doing, forever in on its own bit.
