Not much has changed in the town of Riverdale. The show’s second season may have started last week, but true to the Archie comics on which Riverdale is based, the CW show’s iconography remains eerily arrested in time: nurses in a hospital wear old-school white uniforms with matching hats; kids get milkshakes and burgers at the charmingly misspelled local institution Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe; a teen girl wears a set of pearls at all times, even when she’s having shower sex. The action itself has the same noir-meets-soap-opera churn, just with a different overarching mystery—“Who shot Fred Andrews?” is the new “Who killed Jason Blossom?”—and a new antagonistic parental figure in Mark Consuelos’s Hiram Lodge. And crucially, the whole thing is still narrated with insufferable/endearing self-importance by a certain beanie-sporting burger fiend, here reimagined as a sullen Tumblr bro.
But while Riverdale has returned for its second season more or less as it was, something big has changed offscreen: People are watching. A lot of people. Particularly young people. Not only did its premiere last Wednesday more than double its live finale ratings, at 2.3 million same-day viewers, but once you parse the Nielsen data, according to Vulture’s Josef Adalian, you’ll find that the CW’s Twin Peaks–meets–Gossip Girl genre mongrel exploded by almost 500 percent among teenagers. For an age group that notoriously avoids live viewing in favor of YouTube and Musical.ly, that’s a borderline miracle. And it’s not even counting the so-called “live plus seven” numbers that take into account DVR views for the next week, which are sure to boost those statistics. (Shows with younger-skewing audiences tend to disproportionately benefit from non-linear viewing habits.)
By all appearances, Riverdale is the biggest teen TV phenomenon since 13 Reasons Why, though without the controversy and with actual numbers to support its popularity. To compare its success with other buzzy, youthful shows, Riverdale’s Season 2 premiere scored a 0.8 audience share in the all-important 18-to-49 age group, and the same for the narrower 18-to-34 demographic that advertisers define as millennials. (Eighteen to 34 is a different and broader group than simply “teenagers,” but it’s often used as shorthand for youth appeal, separating younger adults from the middle-aged to allow for a sharper indication of exactly where a show’s fan base lies.) While Riverdale’s growth in the 18-to-34 demo may be less dramatic than among just teens, it’s still a significant factor in the show’s ratings surge. Freeform’s The Bold Type, another show about attractive young people on a teen-focused network, was just renewed for two additional seasons off an average of just 0.1 in 18-to-49 for its entire freshman run, or 0.3 if you count live plus seven. And for just the first episode of its sophomore season, Riverdale matched the series finale of fellow phenomenon Teen Wolf in 18-to-34, even though a send-off is traditionally a much more significant milestone in the life of a show. On the qualitative side, Archie Comics has moved to trademark ’ship names like “Bughead,” a true sign of entering the zeitgeist if there ever were one.
There are clear — and, on the CW’s part, savvy — logistical reasons for Riverdale’s ratings snowball, a remarkable achievement in an era when even hits like Empire and The Big Bang Theory have trouble retaining fans. It all comes down to availability: Since July 2016, as Adalian points out, the network and Netflix have had a unique arrangement whereby entire seasons of CW shows are available on the service just eight days after their finale, as opposed to the months or even years it takes for other series to make their way into the Netflix catalog. The licensing deal may run contrary to the tech company’s overall trend toward original over acquired content, but it’s proved mutually beneficial for both parties. Netflix gets a cache of content that allows it to subsume a separate brand into its own, in contrast with the piecemeal approach it has to take with, say, beloved mid-aughts NBC comedies. (It still has Parks and Recreation and The Office, but just lost 30 Rock to Hulu.) And the CW gets to follow its youthful audience to where it has established permanent residency: the internet.
This rising tide hasn’t exactly lifted all boats: fellow-CW shows Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin, for example, have not taken off, and Supergirl, a show slightly more oriented toward teens, dropped a startling 40 percent in total viewers between its second and third season premieres. Such a disparity indicates that while access certainly enabled Riverdale’s meteoric rise, it doesn’t entirely explain it. Once The Youths had occasion to watch Riverdale, they clearly liked what they saw. Which brings us to the question of Riverdale itself, and what makes a great teen soap in 2017.
Despite Riverdale’s obvious role in this decade’s Great IP Boom, in which even the most outdated of preexisting concepts takes precedence over the risk of an original idea, it’s unlikely that teenagers are drawn in by Archie characters they probably have never heard of, except maybe as broad cultural archetypes. (Riverdale is currently paired with fellow revival Dynasty, which garnered much weaker numbers for its series premiere.) But Archie is also a better candidate for a contemporary-ish rendition than most non-superhero comics, because those archetypes really are eternal, not to mention identical to the ones we’re accustomed to seeing in more traditional CW fare: the spoiled New York City rich kid, the type-A girl next door, the blandly attractive lead, the quirky yet conventionally attractive enough sidekick. Tried-and-true characters in turn give rise to tried-and-true dynamics, from the love triangle to the tortured outcast looking for a sense of belonging. As a motorcycle gang straight out of a Brando movie, the Southside Serpents are more than a little anachronistic, but Jughead’s urge to join them after his father ends up in prison isn’t.
Yet Riverdale tweaks its DNA in obviously modern ways, even as Gothic mansions and Eagle Scouts continue to populate its periphery. Kevin Keller, Archie’s first openly gay character, isn’t just present; he’s a major part of the ensemble, leading to the upcoming, supremely 2017 occurrence of what is essentially a Very Special Episode about the practice of cruising. Veronica is Latina, and both her parents call her mija. Josie, of Josie and the Pussycats fame, performs a cover of Kelis’s “Milkshake” at a local fundraiser. Like 13 Reasons Why, which features a character who is simultaneously a ’50s greaser stereotype and a gay Latino man, Riverdale carefully combines the teen drama’s enduring appeal with some desperately needed updates. The result reflects reality just enough to draw viewers into pure fantasy.
That’s my pet theory to explain Riverdale’s surprise breakout as broadcast TV’s reigning Teen Whisperer: The show is so stylized, so clearly not aiming for verisimilitude that there’s no way it can be mistaken for pandering. Like Gossip Girl, episode titles riff on classic movies that today’s high schoolers are even less likely to know and love than Archie, including “The Outsiders” and “Faster, Pussycats! Kill, Kill!” Offhand references to Truman Capote and Toni Morrison abound. Camila Mendes, who plays Veronica, does hero’s work when delivering objectively corny one-liners, like when she brags about her talent for “dropping vintage bon mots as if they were bon bons.” Anecdotally, one of the most frequent criticisms of Riverdale I hear from fellow adults is that its characters don’t talk or act like real teens — a criticism I’ve never understood because that seems intentional. Riverdale can’t ring as inauthentic because authenticity was never the goal.
Now more than ever, the factors that go into a bona fide hit are a strange and unpredictable alchemy. Whatever the cause, however, Riverdale has managed to do what so few of its peers could: break through the noise, both for savvy adults who make cracks about Hot Archie and teens worried about the fate of Betty and Jughead’s relationship. All we can do is embrace it, ideally as its newly acquired fan base did: via Netflix binge.
