or: why riverdale could have been a much better show than it is
One of my favorite late night pasttimes is to watch YouTube compilations of Riverdale scenes. They are absolutely excoriating. I have spent so many hours thinking about how Riverdale could have been a better show. A much better show than whatever mess the writers are trying to pass off as melodrama with a cherry on top. To be frank, I haven’t seen an episode of Riverdale since the season 1 finale. I couldn’t get past the choppy pacing and chopped-up characters.
This show could have been incredible. It was sitting on a goldmine of potential, and its devoted teen audience has seen that storytelling potential waste away over the years. For however many more seasons the CW keeps renewing this show for, it won’t quite ever recover what the show could have been. Season 1, especially the pilot episode, felt ambient and precipitous. It felt like it was on the edge of something great and we were lucky enough to watch it unfold before us.
In my earliest pre-pilot predictions for the show, I had called it Veronica Mars meets One Tree Hill. Riverdale was supposed to offer the gritty, neo-noir teen detective elements of Veronica Mars that painted a picture of a picturesque town with a seedy underbelly. That picturesque town was supposed to feel like it came out of the One Tree Hill playbook, ordinary slices of life in a quiet, tangled suburb with a sprinkle of realism and a heavy dose of the overdramatic. We wanted simple stories with a self-indulgent teen drama twist. I genuinely thought Riverdale was going to be the next great teen tv show. (These days, I’m still waiting for it). I was so prepared to love it—but if I’ve learned anything from watching years of tv, it’s that you can’t love the idea of something and expect it to be the real thing.
When The CW first announced it had picked up the pilot of Riverdale, I was elated. It was time for another teen tv show to make its societal debut and ascend the throne. Since Gossip Girl ended in 2012, there has been this vacancy for a so bad it’s good show about teens in high school, making mistakes and falling in love and acting ten years past their age. The tv sphere lacked a show about teenagers where one of the characters wasn’t a vampire or werewolf, where the story still felt like it was grounded to a reality that could be ours. Pretty Little Liars had gone off the rails by then and the fact that Riverdale sought to follow in the footsteps of a pilot whodunnit? probably should have been a hard first nail in its coffin. We were ready for the Veronica Mars meets One Tree Hill we were almost promised. What we’ve gotten instead feels paper-thin and forgettable, pure camp with bare substance.
There is so much that has gone wrong since the pilot that it is nearly impossible to rewind and find a place when it was still okay: (1) Grundy, everything about Grundy and writers who felt it was necessary to script yet another inappropriate student-teacher relationship on screen within the first hour of the show; (2) A messy timeline and poorly resolved killer that lost its credibility and shock value; (3) A serial killer named the Black Hood on the loose that makes One Tree Hill‘scrazy nanny Carrie plot mildly forgivable in comparison; (4) Jingle Jangle and all it’s alliterative nonsense; (5) a criminal biker gang from the wrong side of the town sketched as ambiguous antagonists and anti-heroes even when the PCH Biker Gang did it better; (6) the dysfunctional Coopers featuring dark!Betty and Chic and sinners; (7) The Lodges and so-called mafia influences and so-called evil that wears pearls and dark eyeliner; (8) honestly who let Jughead become embroiled with the Southside Serpents and make that the thesis of his character; (9) pretty sure Cheryl has PTSD and should talk to someone who can help her heal, but let’s reduce her to blood red lipstick and snippy one-liners instead; (10) and last and likely least, the conflicted Archie Andrews with half a death wish and puppy dog eyes.
Riverdale could have been so much more if it started back at four kids sitting in a booth at Pop’s diner.
A red-headed boy in a varsity jacket with a guitar slung on his back and dreams too big for a small town. A girl with blonde hair swept up into a high ponytail and fresh cuts on her palm and a burning fire to prove herself. A raven-haired girl with her demons on speed dial and a sharp longing for acceptance. A boy in a grey beanie with a burger in one hand and threads of the messy truth held in the other.
For one shining moment, they were just kids before Riverdale decided it wanted more.