Riverdale; The State Of Things Midseason

I have mixed opinions about this show. I don't want to outright admit it's bad, because it's really not, but it's hard to call it good.

I'm not some Archie Comics uberfan, but as a kid I remember buying the digests from CNA for about R30, which was usually the change I had left over after I bought my Asterix and Obelix comics. I still have a bunch of Archies laying around the house with torn pages from how much I read them. They made me laugh as a kid, and still do. Maybe they weren't deep, or extensive by any means, but they were mine and helped make me the person I am today. And I think that anything that can make a kid who moved around a lot and generally was too shy or didn't stay long enough in one place to make friends laugh is a pretty decent thing and needs no justification of its existence.

I was kind of psyched that CW would be on the show. And when I heard it was being produced by Greg Berlanti, I think I genuinely shed a tear. I love his Arrowverse shows. So when Riverdale caught onto my screen and I finally started watching it, oh boy, were there problems.

Let's talk about them.


While CW does a great job in diversifying the cast, they butcher a lot of characters in the process. I like the the main cast isn't just all white anymore, I think the Archie comics did have an issue there. But I think the Archie comics never had any problem with characterization. You knew from the moment you looked at Archie he was your all-American heart-throb who could be a total klutz and kind of a lady killer, but he had a heart of gold. Betty was the archetypal girl next door, and Veronica was the new stuck up rich kid on the block that you eventually found yourself liking. Reggie was the jerk and competition for Veronica's affections but he was always good for a laugh, Jughead was the unwilling sidekick who would relunctantly offer moral support Weatherbee was the goofy old principle who found himself at the mercy of his student's antics, and Ms Grundy was Professor Mcgonagall.

If you see bare watermarks of those strong characters in the show, you might understand the frustration at the way CW and Berlanti have modernised the show. Furthermore, they removed Grundy entirely. Well, they did and they didn't. They backtracked on Grundy later, because bad ideas are bad. Spoiler alert, Grundy is actually not actual Grundy but someone with the name Ms Grundy who actually has a different name and is someone else. I still wasn't happy, because imagine Harry Potter without Minerva Mcgonagall.
I started liking Riverdale a lot more as soon as not-Grundy left. I think there's a lot more draw in the relationship between Jughead and his dad and between the kids and their parents' drama. When I look back and think about the shows I liked when I was sixteen, Glee comes to mind, and that hyperactive pacing, bright colours, memorable cast are missing from Riverdale.Swap out Finn for Archie, Rachael for Betty and Quinn for Veronica and Glee would have made a better Archie adaptation than Riverdale.
Chuck is turned into a genuine evil person. Sure, chuck wasn't much to write home about, but he was one of the few black characters in the Archie comics and it made me feel a little mad. Betty is also sociopathic, Jughead is broody and 3edgy5me with a constant grimace and the disposition of the type of teenager who enjoyed Edgar Allen Poe a little too much, spouting nihilism and bleak one liners ad-nauseam. Jughead's crown was also changed, and this is for me one of the more heartbreaking ones. I own the double digest that shows how Jughead's crown is actually a cut up fedora with buttons pinning the brim to the top, and it was a unique and interest piece of backstory. The cut up beanie might look a little more relatable, but it's a lot less timeless, I'll say that.

Jughead was also made asexual in recent canon, and well... For all the diversity issues CW fixed, they broke one by making an ace no longer ace. Asexuals are underrepresented in media as is, and as a bisexual who constantly has to deal with bi-erasure, that sucked hard find out.

I personally never much cared for Archie being a klutz, from YA novels to teen dramas, there's enough protagonists who trip over flat ground to get me to roll my eyes for most of it. I'll admit that, at least in Archie's case, it did make him more endearing as a kid, my favourite being how he kept walking into things as he tried to catch snowflakes on his tongue. He later tries to solve this by taping a message to his head to remind him not to catch snowflakes with his tongue, but then walks into a lamp post because he was too busy paying attention to his own reminder.

Archie now is kind of bland.

He's innoffensive for the most part, but there's a reason it's called Riverdale and not Archie; The TV Show.

Oh boy, and let's not forget that queer bait moment with Betty and Veronica at the cheerleading try-outs, what the actual fuck was that about?

The problem with Riverdale is the same problem I had with The Vampire Diaries when it first aired, and that's for the first 8 episodes or so, the show doesn't know what to do with itself. There's a lot of time spent finding it's feet and at the midseason point, it finally has, but the road getting here has been a garbage fire. And like many hard-boiled adaptations, Archie finds itself missing something super vital from its source material.

Whimsy.

You know, like, being playful and unashamedly cliché, being bright and fun and silly.

Kinda like Glee was.

I miss Glee, I really do. And Riverdale makes me miss Glee more. I look at Riverdale and miss Ryan Murphy's hyperactive style. I miss those lightning fast deliveries and lightning fast cuts, with those sugary sweet moments that made me cry. Glee gave me the "coming out" talk I never got from my parents. Glee introduced me to more genres of music than I can count. Glee also was just so epic, even to this day.

And despite having a Glee crossover in the comics, Riverdale decided to take no influences from the show other than musical set-pieces.

There's a good show under all this. There are moments of pure gold in there tucked between the vacuous crap that only the die-hard CW fans and teen drama lovers are going to get to see.

Riverdale is at best the modern take on Archie you didn't really ask for, and at worse, a show that butchers a lot of its source material as well as themes that its network is known for being great at tackling, whilst being at the Pretty Little Liars end of the quality spectrum, if even that.