In the depths of winter in January 2017, the CW welcomed viewers to the curious town of Riverdale, where nothing was quite as it seemed. The girl next door was hiding a terrifying family secret, the town’s political sphere was controlled by the maple syrup Mafia, and every resident was about to feel the aftershocks of an appalling murder.
Riverdale defied expectations from the jump. The show was based on a comic book, but it wasn’t one of the CW’s interconnected DC superhero properties. The Archie-adapted series was styled instead as a modern teen mystery with a retro twist, taking more inspiration from Stephen King and Twin Peaks than from John Hughes or Gossip Girl. Characters clad in knee-length skirts and letterman jackets bounced from high school lounges to underground speakeasies to gangland slums, but they still made time to gossip about crushes in the bedrooms of their white-picket-fence homes. Riverdale never played by conventional teen television’s rules; it poked fun at certain clichés while embracing others and mixed the strange with the familiar. Nights were misty, school was demanding, summers were long, and the doors of Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe beckoned students inside with promises of milkshakes topped with whipped cream and shiny, red cherries.
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It was this atmosphere that drew viewers in, a unique stew of genre conventions that could attract fans of The Craft and John Carpenter just as much as Pretty Little Liars obsessives. This wasn’t your grandma’s Archie: Riverdale was much more cerebral. Episodes courted cinephiles with titles like “Anatomy of a Murder,” “Varsity Blues,” and “The Ice Storm.” Its young cast was an ensemble of relative unknowns shepherded by cult stars like Skeet Ulrich, Madchen Amick, and Molly Ringwald. K.J. Apa portrayed protagonist himbo redhead Archie Andrews as moody and unsure about his future; he was less interested in juggling two girlfriends, as was his priority in the comics, than in solving his hometown’s many problems. His coleads, Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper and Camila Mendes as Veronica Lodge, were two sides of the same coin: the blond Goody Two-shoes and the black-haired vixen who ruled the halls of their high school. Cole Sprouse played Jughead Jones as the dark crush of our nerdy teen dreams. Madelaine Petsch gamely recited the convoluted dialogue of Cheryl Blossom, an uptight aristocrat, with flawless panache—you knew you were in for it when she entered a scene with a fiery “What, pray tell, is the meaning of this?”
What felt like a novelty in Riverdale’s first season became downright surreal in subsequent outings, as the show began relying less and less on coherent plotting to craft its mazelike narrative. Critics will say the show fell off after the first couple of seasons, but I would argue the bizarre plot concoctions of late-period Riverdale only enhanced an already heightened experience. Season 2 tracks the murderous rampage of a serial killer named “the Black Hood,” later revealed to be Betty’s father, which sends her down a spiral in which she’s convinced she’s inherited the debunked “serial killer gene.” In Season 3, the town is overtaken by a sinister Gryphons and Gargoyles craze—mirroring the Dungeons & Dragons satanic panic of the 1980s—that causes schoolchildren to plot their classmates’ gruesome deaths. Season 5 jumps ahead seven years: Betty is an FBI recruit à la Clarice Starling, Veronica has her own Uncut Gems–style jewelry business in Manhattan, and Archie joins the army to go to “war.” What war, exactly? We don’t know! It’s not important. Season 6 begins with a six-episode “event” set in a bizarroverse called “Rivervale,” where magic and the devil are real, and then transports everyone back to normal Riverdale with superpowers and news of a world-ending comet. The final season is set entirely in 1955; all the characters have been living in this new timeline without knowing how they got there.
The show also felt “current” in a charmingly aggressive way, daring to take on issues surrounding consent, homophobia, and racism and solving problems the real world can’t always seem to fix. Betty and Veronica punish a football player for spreading rumors, berating him about the evils of slut-shaming while they wear swimsuits and stilettos. Cheryl is sent to, and then escapes from, a conversion therapy convent led by evil nuns. A revelation that the town was built on land stolen from the local Native American tribe provides the backdrop for a corrupt crime boss’s real estate scheme. In a lesser, more self-serious show, the moral speechifying the characters sometimes slip into would feel pat and inauthentic, but here, it’s sincere. Maybe at times it felt almost excessively sincere, but fans embraced the show’s cringey tendencies and took home valuable real-world lessons in the process.
All of that looks completely overwhelming written out, and trust me, it was overwhelming to watch, too. But the show managed to pull it off by staying true to its retro roots. Riverdale kept the 20-plus-episode seasons of its network television predecessors while other teen melodramas of its ilk went the way of the six- or 10-installment streaming series: too long to be a movie, too short for their worlds to feel truly lived in. The weekly release format meant that those who weren’t watching could still feel the bewildered delight of reading word-salad headlines about what was going on: The show seemed increasingly manic with every passing season. Schools were overtaken by drug epidemics of the stimulant “Jingle Jangle”; gangs of teens found themselves fighting a transdimensional wizard; side characters sold the clunkiest product placements imaginable with hilariously dedicated performances. Riverdale’s penchant for “just doing whatever” alienated some fans in later seasons, but it also delighted others, and those who stuck with the show until the end reaped its strange rewards. No one—truly, no one—was doing it like Riverdale.
That is why it feels so bittersweet, and even unfair, to say goodbye to a TV show full of such bizarre fun. After seven long seasons, Riverdale will come to an end on Wednesday, and the citizens of that small town will bid us, and a whole era of television, a final farewell. It’s hard to explain what exactly will be lost, but … do you ever wish your favorite shows could spare some time for a musical episode? Riverdale did that once a year. Do you wish every fan-favorite ship could have its own swooningly emotional, multiseason lesbian awakening arc? Riverdale did that with a new character every few episodes. Where shows and movies primarily driven by nostalgia have grown stale, Riverdale’s camp pastiche aesthetic took the bones of things we remember loving and spun them into entirely new shapes. The line between madness and genius blurred ever more with each outlandish plot revelation. Riverdale even navigated abrupt story line shifts in the most tragic of circumstances: After the sudden death of Luke Perry, who played Archie’s father, Fred Andrews, the show set aside its madcap frenzy for a somber episode that was more emotionally honest than anything the series had ever done before.
Whether or not you kept up with its twists and turns until the final episode, Riverdale’s absence will leave a hole in the pop culture landscape. There are very few shows out there willing to take the risks that this one did, and there are even fewer networks and distributors willing to spend the money and time to let those shows last longer than a couple of seasons before inevitably canceling them to protect the bottom line. The quirks and idiosyncrasies of Riverdale are impossible to categorize, which makes its mere existence feel like a gift. Wherever we go from here, we’ll always remember: There’s no place like Riverdale.
Emma Stefansky is a writer based in New York City who covers television, film, and books. Her work can be found in Vanity Fair, GQ, IndieWire, and Thrillist. Follow her on X @stefabsky.
