Reinhart plays her vigilante turn with a gusto that conveys years of Betty’s repressing her feelings, and the two girls’ bonding complicates their inevitable love triangle with Archie.
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In the excellent third episode, she and Veronica join forces for a revenge plot against some sex-predator jocks - a theme, lately, in series like MTV’s “Sweet/Vicious.” In another touch of meta-casting, he spars with his father, played by Luke Perry, who practically invented soulful teen brooding on “Beverly Hills 90210.”Īrchie’s gal pals are far more interesting, especially the new, more complex Betty. “Riverdale” is more an ensemble show than the story of Archie, which is fortunate, because here he’s written and played as a flat, brooding bore. Still, the show has a welcome sense of humor about itself. She’s right - Cheryl is more like a stock character from “Glee.” Her line is typical of much of the dialogue in “Riverdale”: It’s clever, but it sounds written. “You may be a stock character from a ’90s teen movie,” Cheryl snipes at Veronica, “but I’m not.” It’s a blizzard of knowing references and characters talking about one another as characters. “Riverdale” is very conscious of its influences - too much so at times. But the series is closer to teen intrigues like “Pretty Little Liars” and “Gossip Girl.” “Riverdale” flirts with the kinky darkness of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” as well as “Twin Peaks,” whose Mädchen Amick plays Betty’s hard-charging, Adderall-pushing mother. “Get closer,” he says, “and you start seeing the shadows underneath.”įinding the corrosion under the waxed-and-polished chassis of small-town America is itself an old trope. Jughead (Cole Sprouse), the wry, burger-munching sidekick of the comics, is now a dour, emo narrator. The town is beset with bullying, sexual harassment and abuse. The malt shop is still in business, but the drive-in is closing down. Meet our new Archiekins: not just ripped, but woke. When Archie asks Josie (Ashleigh Murray) if he might write songs for her group, she scolds him for his white privilege, and he soberly concedes her point. The mayor, the principal and the girl group Josie and the Pussycats are all African-American. Kevin Keller (Casey Cott), a gay student, was introduced in the recent comics.
It’s a more diverse Riverdale, too, if mainly among the supporting characters. Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart), still pining away in Archie’s friend-zone, has an older sister who had a breakdown after an entanglement with Jason. Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes), the spellbinding rich girl, is now a transplant from Manhattan whose father is in jail for fraud. The whole Archieverse is hotter and more haunted. Grundy (Sarah Habel), now a sultry knockout.
Apa) - an aspiring musician with six-pack abs - witnessed a key bit of evidence but can’t talk because of the circumstances: He was hooking up with his music teacher, Ms. The big one surrounds the murder of Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines), who disappeared while on an outing in the woods with his mean-girl twin sister Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch). But it’s a dark, bitter milkshake that “Riverdale” concocts, built on the suspicion that any town this squeaky clean must be hiding decay, corruption and secrets.Īnd jeepers, are there secrets. The familiar characters are back, as are landmarks like Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe. (The showrunner, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, is the chief creative officer of Archie Comics.) It chucks the comics’ old clichés for a new pastiche, drawn from decades of moody teen dramas, that occasionally adds up to something new. The steamy “Riverdale,” which begins Thursday, owes more to those newer iterations. In another, he and the gang flee an outbreak of zombies, one of whom is his old pal Jughead Jones. Recently, the franchise has been redesigned and reconceived.
The comics I read as a kid were an unstuck-in-time palimpsest, in which kids with ’70s haircuts and ’50s lifestyles tooled around in Archie Andrews’s ’20s-era jalopy. Which raises the question: What was the non-weird version? “Riverdale,” the new high school noir on CW, is a dark, weird reimagining of the Archie Comics franchise.