I watched the first episode of Riverdale in the bleary last leg of January, because a vitamin deficiency due to my own poor personal care ministrations and the long shadow of the inauguration made a sex-and-the-single-sophomore murder-mystery starring characters from Archie Comics seem like a comfortingly freakish way to await Armageddon.
I watched the second because I'd be remiss to turn away from a pilot that ends with two boys discovering a corpse while scurrying off to have secret gay river sex. (And, admittedly, because I was convinced it would be revealed that Jughead is a ghost.)
I watched the season finale—after sending months of nearly evangelical texts and emails to friends, coworkers, and a former neighbor whose sociology notes I routinely copied—because creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa had delivered a strange, tender entry into the teen drama lineage that was, incredibly, just what the television landscape needed in 2017.
The CW debuted Riverdale—which returned last night for a second season—as a midseason replacement starring a collection of comely teen-adjacent unknowns and half a pair of ex-Disney twins. It tells the story of an Anywhereville, USA small town in the wake of its most shocking crime, and of the millennial reincarnations of Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Jughead Jones, and Veronica Lodge who live there. The candy-colored characters you eyed while helping Mom load Rice-a-Roni onto the grocery checkout counter are alive, and they talk about Truman Capote more compellingly than you'd believe possible.
Riverdale's sardonic sad-boi narrator, Jughead (Cole Sprouse), is a jarring amalgam of the pretentious teenager I once was, as well as the number of the reedy, slouching queer women I've crushed on. Jughead's insatiable appetite for food in the comics manifests itself on Riverdale as the hole-in-the-gut hunger for affection of a neglected child, and Sprouse's brittle sadness is infuriatingly affecting. Similarly, the decision to craft Betty (Lili Reinhart) as a watercolor Veronica Mars—searing, ungovernable anger coursing just below a sunny, plucky, perfectionist's veneer—is among the show's best surprises.
Veronica (Camila Mendes)—a self-described reformed mean girl, styled like a middle-aged
corporate lawyer—mostly swans around referencing the Bechdel Test. Her most interesting (and baiting) trait is a loyalty to anxious, lantern-eyed Betty so instantaneous that she proposes they make a vow of friendship approximately five days after moving to town. Even Archie (KJ Apa), a golden retriever of a human (that is, if golden retrievers were about half as intelligent as the Air Bud films prove them to be), broke his hand saving a drowning classmate. The foursome's affection is palpable, and even as the show eats through a tremendous amount of plot within a tight timeframe, the writing allows room for quiet growth. Riverdale has created a camaraderie that feels organic, and buoys the more extravagant moments.
The first season's main storyline is focused on the murder of Jason Blossom, a football player who remains a voiceless specter throughout. Riverdale is easily pegged as a kids-table version of Twin Peaks; there's a dead young body in a tucked-away hamlet ripe with insular strangeness and strife, secrets sussed out under pink lighting in diner booths, claims about the hair of a ne'er-do-well father going white overnight, and Twin Peaks's own Madchen Amick as Betty's mother.
But Pretty Little Liars—the teen drama of which the interminable run ended earlier this year—hewed closer to the Lynchian playbook, executing teen horror peerlessly. For all its hyper-stylized genre nods, Riverdale is more like if Dawson's Creek kicked off with Pacey finding a body floating beside his boat. When bereaved diva Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), a matte-lipped wonder and gothic heroine for the Twitter Age, pauses her hairography just long enough to refer to our leads as "sad Breakfast Club," she has a point.
But what makes Riverdale special to me is that I'm as interested in watching these kids try to take care of each other as I am in watching people getting fed drugged milkshakes—or watching teenagers perform surreal covers of "Kids In America" at a school dance while their ex-teen heartthrob parents head-bob hauntingly, or watching a family burn down their gothic manor for spiritual cleansing. If the second season maintains this focus on friendship, while using a larger episode order to flesh out characters who have gone underserved-- for starters, Josie McCoy (Ashleigh Murray), the bandleader of Josie and the Pussycats, is overdue for her own storyline, and Petsch's Cheryl is way too much fun of a character to be wasted as an inconsistent narrative prop then Riverdale's warm, wacky, maple-syrup-mood-piece reign should continue long past the calendar year.
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