TMC
08-15-2023, 08:47 PM
It’s ending as one of the weirdest teen soaps ever made.
https://www.vulture.com/article/riverdale-cast-exit-interview.html?
By Rebecca Alter, a news writer who covers comedy and pop culture
Riverdale premiered in 2017 with a simple premise: What if Archie Comics, those hokey all-American checkout-aisle stalwarts, were dark? The CW show began as a moody small-town teen mystery centered on a “Who killed Laura Palmer?”–style murder. In this world, adapted by showrunner and executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) ****ed — and he wasn’t just in a love triangle with Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) and Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes); he was being groomed by Miss Grundy. Betty had a sadistic alter ego. Veronica’s “Daddykins” was in prison for financial crimes and possible drug-trade connections.
And then came the Gargoyle King. And the Serpent Queen. And musical numbers, so many musical numbers. The show was weird from the start, but around season three, the writers upped the ante with an organ-harvesting cult and evil nuns and an alien abduction and superpowers. Riverdale took tropes from gothic horror, fantasy, telenovelas, soap operas, comic books, gay art-house films, dark high-school comedies, musicals, and mafia movies and smushed them together into a pop-culture polycule — while the ensemble held it all together, putting it on like some sort of weekly vaudeville act.
The show ends August 23 as one of the last of its kind (https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/15rs067/riverdale_began_as_a_dark_spin_on_archie_comics/): the 22-episodes-a-season teen soap. The gang’s now back in the 1950s, and the characters have reverted to teenagers — even though the main cast, which also includes Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl Blossom), Cole Sprouse (Jughead Jones), Casey Cott (Kevin Keller), Charles Melton (Reggie Mantle), Vanessa Morgan (Toni Topaz), and Drew Ray Tanner (Fangs Fogarty), are all in their 20s and 30s. They gathered in June, soon after filming their last scene at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe and a few weeks before the SAG strike began, buzzing with last-day-of-school energy.
https://www.vulture.com/article/riverdale-cast-exit-interview.html?
By Rebecca Alter, a news writer who covers comedy and pop culture
Riverdale premiered in 2017 with a simple premise: What if Archie Comics, those hokey all-American checkout-aisle stalwarts, were dark? The CW show began as a moody small-town teen mystery centered on a “Who killed Laura Palmer?”–style murder. In this world, adapted by showrunner and executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) ****ed — and he wasn’t just in a love triangle with Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) and Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes); he was being groomed by Miss Grundy. Betty had a sadistic alter ego. Veronica’s “Daddykins” was in prison for financial crimes and possible drug-trade connections.
And then came the Gargoyle King. And the Serpent Queen. And musical numbers, so many musical numbers. The show was weird from the start, but around season three, the writers upped the ante with an organ-harvesting cult and evil nuns and an alien abduction and superpowers. Riverdale took tropes from gothic horror, fantasy, telenovelas, soap operas, comic books, gay art-house films, dark high-school comedies, musicals, and mafia movies and smushed them together into a pop-culture polycule — while the ensemble held it all together, putting it on like some sort of weekly vaudeville act.
The show ends August 23 as one of the last of its kind (https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/15rs067/riverdale_began_as_a_dark_spin_on_archie_comics/): the 22-episodes-a-season teen soap. The gang’s now back in the 1950s, and the characters have reverted to teenagers — even though the main cast, which also includes Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl Blossom), Cole Sprouse (Jughead Jones), Casey Cott (Kevin Keller), Charles Melton (Reggie Mantle), Vanessa Morgan (Toni Topaz), and Drew Ray Tanner (Fangs Fogarty), are all in their 20s and 30s. They gathered in June, soon after filming their last scene at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe and a few weeks before the SAG strike began, buzzing with last-day-of-school energy.