Riverdale has never been the most chill teen drama out there, but over the course of its first two seasons its plot has been slowly riding a funicular to the top of Mount Bonkers.
What started out as a show about a very dumb boy who couldn’t play guitar and football at the same time transformed into a wild romp through a world populated with gangsters with names like Poppa Poutine, 15-year-olds leading gangs of violent bikers, and Pixy Stix-looking drugs called Jingle Jangle.
Now that Riverdale’s Season 3 premiere has aired and added cryptids, New Age witchcraft, a blatant disregard for the authorized practice of law, and Labor Day pool parties at a burned-down mansion, it’s time to accept the facts.
Riverdale isn’t a teen drama anymore. Perhaps it never was. Riverdale is a comic book show.
While it seems obvious to say that Riverdale is a comic book show, seeing as its characters and setting come from the 79-year-old Archie Comics brand, calling it one these days specifically aligns Riverdale more with shows like Gotham, The Flash, and Black Lightning than with the dramas to which it was previously compared (Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, to start).
What Riverdale has in common with comic book or superhero shows is its willingness to present a world that feels real but has a silk-thin overlay of the absurd that allows for Cheryl Blossom to be an ace archer who snipes down gang members from the back of a truck, or more mundanely for Archie’s mother to be legally able to represent her own son in a murder trial.
It’s an out-there, stretchy genre that requires its audience to have countless “sure, we’ll go with that” moments with each passing episode.
It’s an out-there, stretchy genre that requires its audience to have countless “sure, we’ll go with that” moments with each passing episode. Archie has a gang of shirtless, masked football players hunting down a serial killer now? Sure, Riverdale. Betty has to do a striptease to the sad song from Donnie Darko to join Jughead’s gang? LOL. Ok. Yeah.
If there is a watershed moment at which Riverdale officially shed its teen drama genre, it must be the very end of the Season 3 premiere, which delivers a double whammy of comic book weirdness.
First, Jughead discovers background characters Dilton (whose most significant moment in the show so far is fencing Archie a gun) and Ben (who has had several blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos, including one that suggested he was Miss Grundy’s next rape victim after Archie) locked in a suicide pact in an act of sacrifice to The Gargoyle King.
Then, Betty Cooper witnesses her mother and sister dropping Polly’s babies into a bonfire, only for the children to magically float safely above the flames. Betty drops to the ground and immediately begins seizing. Cut to credits.
So, hey. There’s magic now. And maybe a spooky demon living in the woods. It wouldn’t be surprising if Riverdale’s supernatural twist was a lead-in to a crossover with Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which takes place in the same universe as Riverdale, but the show was moving towards comic book camp long before the new Sabrina showed her face on the small screen.
In any case, welcome to the new Riverdale. It’s gonna be a wild ride.
