“Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town … Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale.” With this narration over shots of quaint small town ephemera, our favorite weirdo, Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), starts the pilot episode of The CW’s Riverdale. Originally pitched as “The OC meets Twin Peaks,” audiences in 2017 could have never expected how much more the Archie Comics-based series would become. Taking its inspiration from two iconic melodramas, Riverdale became a fever dream, a murder mystery, a horror show, a noir — and above all — a soap opera.
Riverdale builds on a legacy that goes beyond the cutesy and polished comic books. It leans on its network predecessors: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Veronica Mars, Supernatural, Gossip Girl, 90210, The Vampire Diaries, and Jane the Virgin. Just to name a few. It is no surprise that Riverdale continued the work of expertly meshing teenage hormones with just a little bit of murder. From the get-go, it was never about whether Archie would pick Veronica over Betty to go to prom. Instead, it was about upping the ante again and again — delving deep into the mess of growing up with an added layer of darkness.
With the Riverdale series finale airing last month, the era of Peak Teen Television is at an end. Though many teen TV shows such as The Summer I Turned Pretty or Outer Banks have amassed a solid following, they’re not holding the necessary soapy campiness needed to truly overtake Riverdale’s reign.
To talk about Riverdale’s impact, we need to talk about The CW and the state of teen television today. In a 2019 article for Paste Magazine, Alexis Gunderson notes that Teen TV had a groundbreaking decade, “the story of teen television in the 2010s was simply one of more.” With shows like Reign and The Get Down or Sex Education and Euphoria it seemed like the breadth of creative vitality and diversity was never-ending. The range was expansive, not just with a focus on the supernatural or fantasy but series which showed the everyday lives of young people. The latter is something that has been deeply missed by millennials who reminisce on The WB’s Fall 2000 programming.
However, it would seem that since 2019 that Teen TV boom has considerably tapered off. We have Big Streaming to thank for much of the cancellation (and at times even total erasure) of many teen-centered shows that were only getting more diverse and innovative. The result is a list of the best teen TV streaming right now having more than half of its items be shows that are either over, soon to be finished, or canceled.
Even The CW, the home to our great Riverdale, exists in limbo after being bought out by executives who wish to cater to an older audience, turning the focus to sports and other programming that strays far, far away from what made the network great.
And so, Riverdale stands as the last great Teen TV Show that goes beyond a fourth season — a show with a near perfect intertwining of high and lowbrow culture. The show was never afraid of making fun of itself while also taking their (mostly young) audience seriously. Riverdale, under the helm and creative vision of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, leaned on references as far ranging as Donna Tartt’s novel “The Secret History” to Beat poetry, from Dungeons and Dragons (see: Gryphons and Gargoyles) to The Silence of the Lambs.
The references in the show went beyond the thematic or within storylines but were linked to characters and their respective actors. We had Luke Perry (Beverly Hills, 90210), Skeet Ulrich (Scream), Mädchen Amick (Twin Peaks), and Molly Ringwald (self-explanatory). All icons of teen TV and films past get to recreate and relive the eras of their youths but also pass on the baton to future generations.
One incredible referential scene happens in “Manhunter,” the sixth episode of season three, in which the Riverdale teens are trying to figure out the mysteries behind the killer Gryphons and Gargoyles game they’ve been playing. The Gargoyle King is seemingly trying to break into the Cooper’s home and as Mrs. Cooper (Amick) investigates upstairs, F.P. Jones (Ulrich) climbs in through the window and reassures her with a hug. As the popcorn on the stove reaches its over-popped point, Jones stares eerily suspiciously past her.
This scene is an almost shot by shot recreation of Ulrich’s Billy consoling Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Wes Craven’s slasher Scream. This reference works twofold, as the sins of the past come to haunt those in the present. Or we have season four, in which every episode is titled after quintessential movies any film buff should be in the know about. Though it may not work in direct connection to these movies, Riverdale still finds a way to pay homage through its half-baked and heightened storylines that are done with love and deep care of what came before.
While Riverdale’s dialogue could sometimes fall just beyond the point of cringiness (why was a 40-year-old man so concerned with what a teenager was doing!) and each plot twist brings their characters to new extremes (including an organ-harvesting cult), this fantasy worked perfectly in tandem with the show being a soap opera. The allure of these teens getting to do what they want in this town, even if removed from the realm of reality, allows them to see themselves at the center of their own precocious universe — where they rightly belong.
Riverdale the show and Riverdale the town work because teenagers can be pretentious and are always trying to reference pop culture moments to show that they also can be in conversation with “adults.” While to some it might just be another out of pocket storyline, if you understand the references being made this is cinema. This is where the creators of Riverdale elevate not just the art they’re creating, but the audiences that tune in. The show makes “The Classics” accessible — because anyone who wants to watch a noir film or a Lynch creation will now understand it through the lens of Riverdale. Viewers might even get to know icon and auteur of queer cinema, Gregg Araki, after seeing he directed a season two episode. Doesn’t that make the world a little bit better?
So many people will write off the show, as many already have, due to its wild fabrications; but the ways in which the series traversed through genres and stories while at its core keeping to the spirit of what it means to grow up and make sense of the world was nothing short of magnificent. Riverdale did with pop culture what its ancestor Gossip Girl did with fashion. Even with the highs and lows of high school football, it contains the perfect formula for a cult classic.My lovely friend and fellow teen film scholar, Claire White, said it best: “I think there’s no surprise we go from loving Gossip Girl to loving Riverdale.”
