Riverdale: The Show That Went Completely Insane

here's a few out of context moments from riverdale one attendee of riverdale high is discovered to be a grown woman pretending to be a high school student there is a group of homoerotic superheroes a 17 year old competes in a bare-knuckle boxing match with an evil billionaire to take control of the town there is a magic word that wipes people's memories and puts them into a violent murder trance there is a cult of evil subterranean nuns known as the sisters of quiet mercy a character spends the night playing dungeons and dragons with ghosts before beating himself to death with a baseball bat a girl is haunted by an evil doll the town of riverdale is invaded by zombies there are nine serial killers across four seasons one of whom is an 11 foot tall monster known as the gargoyle king this happens mr shipping i'm sorry jughead that i couldn't help you mr tippy this also happens many other things happen and i would like to talk about them see i've developed a unhealthy obsession with this show i am fascinated by it fascinated as to how a show that started as a very normal teen drama could morph into one of the most bizarre and ridiculed shows on television and to ask is there value in that oh god i think there might be to properly chart this full descent into madness i want to take a second and look at the original comic series that began in 1941 and full disclosure as a bog child who grew up in ireland my experience with the archie comic goes exactly as far as that one joke from the simpsons but looking back on it now it's easy to imagine how the pastel world of diners and milkshakes would have been the simple escapism america needed post world war ii escapism that's centered around archie your lovesick teenage every man ensnared in a love triangle between betty the safe but fun wholesome girl next door and veronica the fiery high society daughter of a millionaire so i guess kinda like oscar and rey if you grew up in the 60s these are the correct choices and i'm closing comments as well as jughead the aloof burger hungry best friend who balanced out the romance-obsessed cast by having zero interest in it stories were simple the art was charming but what's interesting looking back now is how guarded that style was despite being worked on by dozens of different artists and writers over the decades the series never really changed the license holders being so protective they even shut down a gay archie stage play as they were worried it would harm the integrity of the characters well i hope that decision doesn't become retroactively humiliating however this unwillingness to change meant that by the early 2000s archie this series that had once regularly outsold batman and superman had shrunk to just point five percent of the market leading to a wave of titles that broke the traditional style and tone of archie like the ironically named life with archie where archie dies but it was actually a variant cover of this comic that would change the fate of the series forever one depicting archie facing zombified versions of betty veronica and jughead which led to another spin-off after life with archie which i refuse to explain the premise of because you can see it right here and afterlife with archie was kind of awesome a really cool piece of horror while simultaneously being this really interesting take on an alternate riverdale and it was a smash hit selling forty thousand copies and propelling its writer roberto aguero sakasa to the chief creative officer of archie comics sakasa being the writer of that gay archie stage play that had been shut down oh dear as well as the person who would go on to pitch and become the lead creative on riverdale sakasa is an interesting fellow but if i could find one quote to sum him up creatively and what honestly made a lot of riverdale make a lot more sense it would be this 2003 interview where he talks about how one of his assignments in drama school was to write a one hour play using just a single set and no more than four characters the play i wrote was over two hours long had seven actors two of whom were kids three sets and a giant squid this is the mindset that riverdale came from and worth noting as we descend into madness but things don't start off that way the first season of riverdale feels like a very average teen drama tinged with a trace of twin peaks the story beginning when jason blossom heir to the blossom family fortune is discovered drowned in a boating accident alongside his twin sister cheryl who has survived his death rippling through the town and unearthing a stockpile of unsavory secrets and then jason's dead body is never used in another plotline ever ever again before we dive into riverdale season 1 i do want to acknowledge that the internet and society tend to be very cruel to well anything teenage girls get excited about and as tempting as it is to join the lucrative subgenre of men in their 30s getting angry about children's media that is really not my goal here and there are positive things about season one of riverdale like the casting is generally pretty great lily reinhardt imbues betty with a sweetness and charisma that really captures the charm of that character madeleine pesch as cheryl has this cruel sarcastic edge that unironically makes her so much fun and kj appa playing archie who spends half the show getting the piss kicked out of him performs the character with the innocent sympathy of a small dog who cannot get his playstation working on christmas morning he also looks very good with his shirt off and the show is very very aware of this in fact the entire cast of riverdale including the parents all have this level of unearthly super beauty i could only liken to some impossible sacred deer god so it is a nice show to look at and unfortunately that is where my praises end if we break down season one into its two core aspects it would be the murder mystery plot and the high school drama that plays out between the characters and it's that second part that makes up the vast vast majority of season one the problem being that it's just not very good when not borrowing plot lines from other better teen dramas your oc's your gossip girls your dawson's creeks yes i have watched all of these no i will not offer any explanation the only thing that riverdale really has to set itself apart is its attempt to tackle modern teenage social issues which it does do very badly riverdale season one has this habit of dragging up social issues but then discussing them with all the language reluctance of my partner whenever i suggest she give dragon ball z another go case in points the episode on shaming it starts when veronica hooks up with a football player chuck only for her to be slut-shamed on social media the following morning chuck claiming he gave veronica a a sticky maple and it's like okay cool slut-shaming's a real problem and a topic that shows like this should talk about however we soon learned that veronica never actually slept with chuck and he's been lying as he has with every other girl he's harassed in the same way now i am not a lady so i might be out of my depth here but in a story about how women shouldn't be shamed for having healthy sex lives is it not perhaps an important part of that story that the women in question do have healthy sex lives because if they don't then the focus now shifts from women are being slut-shamed and that is a societal problem two this one football player is a liar and that's well that's very bold and even carrying this kind of shitty implication that if these girls had actually slept with chuck they would be more deserving of the online harassments it's frustrating because the show did have a chance to say something cool and interesting here it just didn't and that is a constant across season one but particularly in how they handle jughead see a staple of jughead's character across nearly all archie comics is that he has zero interest in romance because if he does that would disrupt the love triangle of betty veronica and archie and this has led a lot of fans to speculate that jughead is asexual this aspect of the character was actually canonized in 2016 but in riverdale [Music] it's disappointing for two reasons one i'm sure asexual folks would have appreciated the representation there are very few asexual characters on television and one of them is spongebob squarepants and two i think creatively this would have been a much more interesting direction for the character like take todd from bojack horseman part of what makes this character feel like such a sweet little angel man was watching him figure out himself and the difference between sexual and romantic love and it made for these super endearing plot lines that felt fresh and original because you hadn't seen them a hundred times before and the creators are aware of this cole sprouse who plays jughead has been an advocate for this direction for the character and even in early interviews sakasa and the writers have stated that they planned on exploring this aspect of jughead but we are now five seasons in and my point here is not that the show is bad for not portraying jughead as asexual just that this is part of a larger trend of insincere writing where the show wants to come across as socially conscious but does it insincerely or ineptly and it does so with even the most basic of social issues like take this scene in veronica's home where ethel confesses that her dad has been fired her family is broke and she's struggling with mental health and veronica says girl we have a lot more in common than i thought we lost our place at the dakota being ruined sucks and it's just how are you ruined veronica look around you sitting in your chanel outfit nibbling your quiche lauren off your bone china in your literal mansion arguably the bigger issue is that when riverdale is not grossly misunderstanding poverty it is just every other high school show you have ever seen most of the locations take place in your typical hallways classrooms locker rooms and walks to school and all have the same personality-less muted dull look to them the stories that play out within them not really much more exciting betty's mom is mean that jughead's dad drinks too much and little archie andrews gets stage fright while playing his guitar it never feels like we're learning anything about these characters through the scenarios they're placed in or the actions they take in those scenarios but instead we just get these weird awkward spiels as they just monologue about their own identity in a way that's well uh in case you haven't noticed i'm weird i'm a weirdo i don't fit in and i don't want to fit in have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on that's weird yeah and while there is fun in the murder mystery plot and there are occasional flashes of strangeness like betty putting on a wig and becoming dark betty or cheryl's weird vampire coven of a family outside of these fleeting instances it's just a bog standard high school drama of such crushing mediocrity that god help me i'm about to use a graph to explain it here is something that i well just kind of made up really that i like to call the mediocre valley on the x-axis we measure from low quality to high quality and on the y-axis we measure from unenjoyable to highly enjoyable and if we were to chart my taste in media it would follow this curve right here at the highest end of both quality and enjoyment we would have something legitimately great like cowboy bebop but on the opposite end we would have something like the infamously terrible film the room however despite the ocean of difference in the two's quality both rate as highly enjoyable bebop because it's well it's a masterpiece and the room because through its sheer awfulness it becomes this bizarre and fascinating portrait of the person who created it it might not be traditionally great art but god damn is it entertaining but then there's this section in the middle right here and this is the dreaded mediocre valley and it's here where i would place season one of riverdale a series that simultaneously has nothing to say while never being brave enough to be terrible and this carries right through the entirety of season one up until its very final scene and it's here where things start to get a little unusual with all the plot threads tied up we close out season one with a scene of archie joining his dad for a milkshake at pop's diner he enters the bathroom and gives himself this smile like hey everything's gonna be all right no archie you haven't even been mauled by a bear yet when suddenly he hears shouting coming from outside and emerges to find a gunman menacing pop tate before turning his gun on archie's dad who is shot trying to protect archie the gunman fleeing the scene bringing season one of riverdale to a shocking close and i have a theory about this scene and that is i don't think the writers had any idea what they were doing when they wrote this scene i don't think they knew who the shooter was or where this storyline was going i think this was just written as a big shocking moment that might not sound like a big deal but whatever i'd say about the rest of season 1 it does feel like a planned story with an inciting incident that triggers each character's arcs all of which wrap up logically by the final episode and if i'm right then this scene is the moment that that stopped happening when the show goes from a coherent narrative to something else and so i'm gonna let you be the judge which is why you'll forgive me for presenting my case as to why i believe the writers did not know where this story was going in excruciating detail okay i want to start by asking a very simple question what happens in this scene and specifically what is the motive of the gunman and there are three pieces of evidence to tell us this the first being the gunman initially targeting only pops presumably because his objective is to get money from the till only turning on fred when he tries to intervene and supporting this is our second piece of evidence though it's muffled we can hear the gunman scream and fred to give me your wallet our third piece of evidence coming after fred is shot when we can plainly see loose dollar bills littering the floor presumably which the shooter took from pop's till and so the conclusion i think most reasonable people will come to is that the gunman's motive was to steal money which led to a botched robbery resulting in fred andrews being shot by accidents now what if i told you [Music] that that is not what happened season 2 begins and the entire scene is no longer a botched robbery but instead the introduction of the green eyed serial killer the black hood a maniac hell-bent on cleansing riverdale of sinners who targeted fred andrews because of an extra-marital affair he was having with veronica's mom and this change raises three big inconsistencies with how the scene was originally shot one if fred andrews was the gunman's target then why did he attack pups first fred is plainly visible from the entrance and two if this was not a robbery and his motive was to kill fred and not steal money then why ask for fred's wallet especially before shooting him if that was the original intention and three if this really wasn't a botched robbery then where did the loose bills littering the ground come from it's through these three inconsistencies we can see how both the motives of the gunman and the actual events of the scene itself were changed in between seasons meaning okay while writing this i actually found some evidence that maybe i'm wrong here the black hood is an old mlj comic book superhero and the show does like to reference classic mlj characters a lot so the gunman wearing a black hood could indicate that they really did have bigger plans for this scene and there is a line in the narration that indicates this wasn't just a random robbery marked by an act of violence it was anything but random granted that could have just been added in post-production after this was shot but the inconsistency with the wallet well season two actually addresses this directly by speculating that the black hood took fred's wallet so he could learn where fred lives and attack archie and his dad at a later date which does kind of make sense man why would i set up my own argument only to debunk it my self objection or so i would say if the second season's attempt to cover up the inconsistency with the wallet didn't lead to a far bigger inconsistency see when we eventually find out the identity of the black hood he's revealed to be hal cooper betty's father who also had an extra marital affair but you know it's fine it doesn't matter who wouldn't need fred andrew's wallet to know where he lives because the two are next door neighbors but my real silver bullet piece of evidence in my case as to why the writers really had no idea who the black hood was even well into season two comes in that little innocuous detail they gave us about the black hood's green eyes because if we look at this scene from season 2 episode 10 we can very clearly see that hal has blue eyes but then fast forward to season 2 episode 20 and his eye color has now changed to a vibrant green because it's only now he's being written as the black hood meaning the writers really would have had no idea who this character was or where the story was going when they first wrote it your honor i rest my case the reason i'm going into such detail about oh god i shouted too much in the previous section and i think i've lost my voice hang on i'm gonna drink some water the reason i'm going into such detail about this is that understanding how this scene was wrote changes the intended purpose behind it it wasn't written as the beginning of a planned narrative but as this big instance of shock and awe designed to draw in as much attention as possible and here's the thing it worked riverdale saw a huge spike in viewership from season one to season two and while there could be multiple factors at play here i'd bet that the shock of the shooting scene at the end of season one was a big factor in it and so after languishing for a season as a sub-average teen drama the entire direction of riverdale begins to change the second season of riverdale begins and immediately something is different even the look of the show feels more surreal and intense like here's a nighttime scene of pop's diner from season one and here is that same location in season two and look at how much more awash the characters are in glowing neon and a lot of the scenes have this same extreme treatments some are lit with the somber intensity of a french neonoir others the stabbing neon palette of an 80s slasher movie and adding to that surreal feel is the set design the internet and phones exist in riverdale but only when they're relevant to the plot but a lot of the technology is from a period much older than that you have these old-timey automobiles corded telephones and retro analog televisions and it all comes together to give the town of riverdale this surreal feel like it's a place that exists outside time and space and this is just the beginning of the bizarreness some characters are completely recast with more extreme personas reggie was basically your nice jock boy in season one but the new reggie in season two is immediately like you kids want to buy some drugs and as for the main cast their plot lines begin to barely resemble those of a high school show jughead becomes the leader of a biker gang and at one point cuts off a woman's tattoo with a pocket knife archie joins the mafia buys a gun and this happens who made a mistake what the hell who made a mistake okay i i added in the sound effects myself but it's still pretty wild veronica's dad hiram lodge is finally introduced and from this point becomes the show's central villain and oh my god i love this character he keeps a giant portrait of himself above his desk things get weirdly erotic between him and archie there is nothing soft about me okay well i ship it veronica no betty discovers she has a spooky brother who moves into their home and oh my god he's a serial killer oh no wait no that's her half brother her real brother is in the fbi that's a relief oh my god he's also a serial killer and he's in love with the first serial killer brother oh well at least she's still got her dear old dad oh no so if season one of riverdale is your typical high school drama season two starts to feel like a strange feverish crime thriller and when i started to look into why there might be such a massive shift in tone between seasons what i found was pretty interesting here is every writer or writing team who worked on riverdale season one here are the writers who stayed on for season two and here are all the new writers that were brought on board for the second season having so many new writers was always going to change the tone of the show but it may also explain riverdale's increasingly erratic plot lines like there's this episode where a mysterious illness begins causing simultaneous seizures in the women of riverdale and we spend the entire 42 minutes building to this big dramatic reveal that the town of riverdale is infected with a deadly disease and will be put under quarantine only for the next episode to start like this it's been five weeks since we were cut off from the rest of the world the quarantine's been lifted an entire story arc just just gone with the seizures being explained away much later as a problem with the town's water supply and as for why it only affects women or why it happens simultaneously that question is literally asked by one character and ignored by another it's in instances like this that you can feel that same philosophy that resulted in the diner scene from season 1 create big dramatic moments everything else and if it sounds like i'm criticizing riverdale i'm actually not see i've seen this kind of storytelling somewhere before during the late 90s wrestling's biggest star was stone cold steve austin he was angry he drank beer and he was great and his biggest rival wasn't another wrestler but vince mcmahon the real life owner of the company this rivalry taking place during wwe's attitude era a time when wrestling was attempting to appeal to a teenage audience with moments of shocking violence or sexuality or whatever is going on here and one of the most memorable stories that came from this was the introduction of the higher power a mysterious cloaked figure who led a cult of evil wrestlers who reigned all kinds of chaos over the wwe like crucifying other wrestlers or kidnapping vince mcmahon's daughter and forcing her to marry an undead wizard to the point that mcmahon and austin had to set aside their differences and face this mysterious new enemy together and that's when on june 7th 1999 vince mcmahon would demand from backstage that the higher power finally reveal himself i say the evil demonic sov show his face to the world now who could it be [Applause] it's me austin oh son of a what it's me austin it was me all along austin in a twist that made no sense to anyone except maybe himself vince mcmahon was revealed as the higher power his motives were nonsense it didn't progress the storyline or his rivalry with austin in any meaningful way it was just this moment but the thing is people including myself remember this really fondly the attitude era was full of big shocking moments like this and that is a big part of why it is so fondly remembered by fans despite the fact that the actual storylines and wrestling were frequently quite bad and i do think there's something kind of compelling about the audacity that comes with narratives focused on creating insane moments like this that just aren't possible with more technically competent storytelling it might not always be good or logical or even coherent but god damn it can be entertaining that is a lot of the appeal of attitude era wrestling and that is also the appeal of riverdale and from this point on good god strap yourselves in because nothing can prepare you for the sheer insanity that is riverdale's third season season three of riverdale or as i like to call it archie goes to prison is one of the most bewildering but i have to be honest here wildly entertaining pieces of television i've ever seen the early story lines focused on archie going to beautiful boy jail after being framed for murder where the evil warden forces him to compete in an evil underground fight club and this this right here is the tamest storyline of the entire season as back in riverdale a new girl has started at riverdale high evelyn evernever whose father is the leader of a uh grassroots religious movement known as the farm at first it seems harmless but then slowly the farm begins to wrap its tendrils around riverdale high as more and more of its students begin dressing in white and subscribing to the farm's bizarre lifestyle and where this story hits a ludicrous peak comes with the mid-season musical episode by the way riverdale has musical episodes and i know that's not that unusual but god they're strange when after performing the musical version of the heathers a lone man in the crowd stands and begins an eerie rhythmic clap and evelyn says this i knew my dad would like it we are introduced to the leader of the farm edgar evernever and as he claps more and more of the town's people begin to rise all dressed in white all clapping in this eerie rhythmic [Music] it might be the chaos goblin in my brain but i kind of love this moment it's such an insane and fun way of revealing how much of this town has been taken over by this creepy cult and sure it's schlocky and garbage but this right here this is gourmet garbage and do you feel that do you feel us rising out of the mediocre valley and that's only going to continue as this storyline grows more and more ludicrous as more and more people begin to join the farm including betty's mom only for betty to uncover that evelyn is actually 26 years old uh i just want to point out that multiple actors playing high schoolers in riverdale were actually in their late 20s when this was shot and uh that's um well that's really funny is actually edgar's wife and has gone through high school multiple times in order to recruit teenagers to the farm the farm now performing psychic surgery on its members to heal their emotional pain but is actually unbeknownst to its followers secretly stealing their internal organs as part of a massive organ harvesting ring but also to keep evelyn alive whose organs are constantly failing the season ending with the entire cult just wraps your bombing out of existence oh and that that's everything that happens in season three of riverdale the story of how a cult takes over the town oh i'm sorry i seem to have misread my notes here did i say cult i meant to say cults see while all this is happening there is also a second cult simultaneously taking over the town and the way this cult works hi i just want to say that everything i'm about to say actually happens and the show takes it very seriously is through a haunted game of dungeons and dragons player manuals for a mysterious new tabletop game called griffins and gargoyles begins to appear around the town the people who play it becoming so addicted they are unable to tell reality from fiction with the game's quests involving committing suicide through poison chalices and just straight up murder with its most devote followers joining an evil gang called the gargoyles who look like this sound like this veronica lodge hasn't paid what she owes and also worship an 11 foot tall monster who randomly teleports around town and murders people and is called the gargoyle king and the people of riverdale are just like okay there's a gargoyle king now if there's no wedding reception it means the gargoyle king is one i'm aware of how insane all this sounds but some of the car crash moments this story leads to are just they are just so good after betty and her mom are attacked by the gargoyle king betty is committed to the sisters of quiet mercy home for wayward youth where the gargoyle king and his followers won't be able to get at her but then betty goes to art class and oh no everyone's painting pictures of the gargoyle king archie escapes from beautiful boy prison and him and jughead takes shelter in a small town and oh no this is an evil gargoyle king town i'm not even going to try and make sense of how this all plays out the gargle king is literally revealed to be four different people at various points in the story one of whom was also kind of the black hood and this is all simultaneously happening alongside archie in prison and the farm storyline and it's it's madness but the peak of lunacy comes with how season three ends for reasons that are far too complicated for me to explain archana's friends get trapped in an anime-style game of death where they must play poisoned chalice russian roulette and and fight mutant bear men i think that's what's going on here i just want to note that this is a separate encounter from the regular bear attack and after all that we get to the end of the episode and everything's worked out the gargle king is defeated the farm have rupture bombed from existence and this happens to the future [Music] archie archie we have to burn all of our clothes including jughead's beanie we'll wash off the blood in the swimming hole after tonight we never speak of this ever no one this brings us to season four of riverdale and like a small child throwing tennis balls into a deep fog riverdale now begins hurling plot lines with no concept of where and when they might land and the rate at which these new plot lines materialize and vaporize becomes so frantic and insane and to show you this here is everything that happens in season four of riverdale veronica starts a sexy car wash and after spending the entirety of season three trying to get her father sent to jail she comes home only to find him waiting for her and when she's like daddy how did you escape from jail he's like mia i own that jail brilliance archie opens his own community center boxing gym and later becomes a masked vigilante this is the second time in riverdale this has happened and begins attacking local drug operations by himself with a baseball bat jughead enlists in a spooky prep school with a history of disappearing students where him and his roommate are murder bullied tony cheryl's girlfriend discovers cheryl has actually been keeping the body of her dead brother jason who i remind you died in season one in her basement and talks to it like he's still alive and then jason's body is never used in another plotline ever ever again random riverdale citizens begin to receive spooky vhs tapes betty's sister shows up at school with a bomb strapped to her which betty must disarm despite a fbi agent standing right beside her before betty is then kidnapped by the firm who never actually rapture bombed despite the clothes being right there meaning they all just ran outside naked i guess and betty finds herself imprisoned in i think mexico in the farms complex with her mother who was actually just pretending to be a member of the farm for a new story despite getting a tattoo of the farm selling her home for the farm and marrying the farm's leader betty and her mother escaping and freeing everyone before chasing edgar evernever to the roof of their secret cult complex where he has built his own rocket ship he is going to use to fly away from the fbi and i'm just okay okay okay i'm i'm sorry it's just look at this image look at how he's dressed his little belt buckle says edgar this this is the moment i became convinced i was not laughing at riverdale but with it i mean look at this look at this image are you honestly telling me that a human being with a brain and a soul wrote this moment and was not aware of what they were doing i mean look at it there are people who legitimately think riverdale season one is good and everything after that is bad and and i'm sorry but if you genuinely believe that little archie andrews getting stage fright while playing his guitar is more entertaining than the leader of an organ harvesting cult building his own space rocket to escape the fbi while dressed like this then you are not fun at parties and i don't want to hang out with you that is everything that happens during riverdale season four oh i'm sorry i seem to have misread my notes again did i say season four i meant to say season 4 episode 3 everything i just described this all takes place in a single 42-minute episode that is how bananas this show now is and unfortunately it's here where the party kind of ends i do feel bad criticizing season four as the show was hit by two major incidents that were out of its control the first was kovid and the second was the tragic passing of luke perry who played fred andrews which had to have been a real blow to the cast and crew he was great in the show and the tribute episode to him is really touching and there are fun moments in season four the gangs start to receive these creepy video tapes of people dressed as the comic book versions of themselves and murdering people cheryl is haunted by an evil doll before seemingly attempting to commit suicide by gassing herself only for it to be a ploy to smoke out her evil mother who has been living inside her walls i remember that bit where the school teacher jumped out the window well it sure would be silly if that happened a second time but unfortunately season four is also where riverdale's writing sins really start to catch up with it even by riverdale standards there's some plot lines that are just so sparse and bizarre like kevin joining an underground tickle fighting ring which i would bet money was the result of one of the writers watching the documentary tickled but the real problem comes from the central mystery remember that beautiful insane moment at the end of season 3 that i personally think makes it look like the gang 8 jughead well we spent the vast majority of season 4 working our way back to this point constantly getting these little flash forwards like archie veronica and betty getting arrested or jughead's dead body in a morgue he's he's definitely dead right right but when the eventual mystery is revealed it's just that one of these spooky prep kids bunked him on the head and tried to pretend that betty did it and so it's like hey you know the bad guys of this season well turns out they were the villains all along and besides this explanation carries several inconsistencies for example how would the gang be covered with this amount of blood from such a shallow head wound and how did that blood get under their cloak actually no no i'm i'm not doing this again trust me i really don't think they knew what they were doing when they wrote this scene and the majority of season four just feels like the writer is trying to explain their way back to it and it is some of the most frustrating television i have ever watched jughead turns out to be still alive he was just hiding and those mysterious murder videotapes well those were just jughead's little sister being a scamp after the ludicrous heights of season three this feels like a massive step down a season where you can start to feel the show sliding back into mediocrity so yeah i don't know maybe this kind of trash entertainment really doesn't have any value maybe i shouldn't have made this video man bummer and then season five happens and there's honest-to-god aliens and archie fights in a war and they're subterranean mole people and cheryl starts a cult around jason's dead body and betty's in the fbi now hunting two new serial killers an evil man lives in the sewers called the rat king there's ghosts an evil maple syrup mothman and and be gone from my temple or i will smite thee for i am cheryl blossom queen of the bees why that's the only question left now right why am i spending 44 minutes talking about this stupid show and the answer is pretty simple it's because i like it i really like riverdale and i know a lot of people don't and they're not wrong there is a lot to criticize with this show but for me the value of a piece of media isn't dictated by what it does badly but by what it does well and with riverdale sometimes i don't need a deep dive into the human condition or to be confronted with the existentialism of my own mortality sometimes i just need to sit on my couch with my partner eat bad take out and laugh and howl as life's ills fall away in the blazing spectacle of a show that has completely lost its mind there's a chaotic beauty to bad media and rather than something succeed in mediocrity i'd prefer to see it fail spectacularly and that's what i think riverdale does friends thank you for joining me today and i really hope you had a good time with this video and if you did and would like to help me create more like it you can do so over at patreon.com forward slash super eyepatch wolf where for just one dollar you can help me make more videos like this special thanks this week to jump pro jennifer steele wes bodie weak century hyper exist valerie kusnikov and space attorney find me as ever hosting the let's fight a boss video game podcast on twitter at ipatchwolf or on twitch.tv forward slash super ipatchwolf friends take care of yourselves and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 2,195,497

Keywords: Riverdale, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Cheryl, Betty, Bughead, Insane, Wierd, Bad

Id: DZ-FRSXypUE

Length: 44min 33sec (2673 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/PogromStallone]

The craziest thing about the show is that the writers seem to have no idea what show they're making.

Listen to any interview with them or follow them on Twitter and they act like they're making high art.

Sam Witwer said his death scene was ludicrous and the writers started talking shit about him online.

I mean, just check out the scene: https://youtu.be/taY0G5dD4Z0

Also the creator of Riverdale raging about the Nancy Drew show was hilarious and they banned any talk about it on the Riverdale subreddit.

edit: figured I might as well write out the Nancy Drew situation since I assume most haven't heard about it.

So when the CW announced they were making a Nancy Drew show, the creator of Riverdale, RAS, threw a fit because he thought they were ripping him off. He genuinely thought that he had come up with the "teens solving mysteries" genre.

When the first posters for the show appeared, he once again started ranting about how they were ripping him off. They were ripping him off so much that they even copied the Riverdale posters. How did they copy them? It had the cast standing next to each other with moody lighting. That's it.

After an episode or two of Nancy Drew had aired, RAS started shit talking the actress playing Nancy. This led to Riverdale fans harassing her online and got so far that she actually had to put out an apology. For what? I don't know. Daring to be Nancy Drew?

This is where I kinda stopped following it because pretty much any place discussing Riverdale would ban any mention of it. And it wouldn't surprise me if the CW gave him a talking to.

Oh, and in Riverdale, Betty's childhood hero was Nancy Drew and they would often mention her in the first season but after the show was announced, that completely stopped and Betty's childhood hero was now their own character, Tracy True.

I should also mention that Nancy Drew is an infinitely better show than Riverdale. Had it been on another network, it would have been huge by now. But the stench of the CW is dragging it down and it's only recently with shows like Stargirl and Superman & Lois that people have caught onto the fact that not everything CW-related is awful.

[u/EldenRingworm]

You haven't experienced the ultimate highs and lows of highschool football

[u/SmokePenisEveryday]

My buddy watched and raved about this show. At no point did he ever let on that it was this one insane. From him, I've assumed it was a standard teen drama.

[u/StarandIcon]

This video was such a trip to watch.

My favorite part is the episode which ends on the shocking cliffhanger that the town was placed into quarantine, only for the next episode to start with "well that whole quarantine thing pretty much blew over after a few weeks"

[u/Foghate]

It seems to me like part of the appeal was that it never was remotely sane to begin with.

[u/Daze_Confuse]

I, like a lot of other people, found the first season to be oddly charming and kind of quaint. Season 2 upped the ante a lot, but, minus one scene of a high school girl doing a strip tease in a biker bar, it wasn't that outrageous. It wasn't really until the Archie prison/DnD knockoff plots and then everything after that that it went off the rails.

This newest season is when I just couldn't do it anymore. The plots aren't even dumb fun anymore, they are just dumb and during the hiatus with the Jughead cliffhanger, I found myself not caring at all about when it returned.

Edit: And I also forgot to mention the whole Chilling Adventures of Sabrina set up that never came and simultaneously made both shows worse off for it with all the production/network issues. Or how the main actors actively show disdain for the show when they do interviews lol.

[u/Lockenveitch]

It totally went insane. My wife and I still watch, basically to laugh at how crazy and disjointed it is. ...and to make a drinking game out of every time they make poor Archie take off his shirt.

[u/seanprefect]

I kinda want to see the HBO version of this show

[u/bluebottled]

Shit I'm only one minute in and this has convinced me to watch.