I don’t know if anyone’s been watching lately, but that performance of the “song from Donnie Darko” (WTF?! No Tears for Fears acknowledgement even though it was the Gary Jules style) was one of the weirdest, most cringeworthy things I have ever seen.
Uh, we are an episode or two behind so not sure what you are talking about. And never seen Donnie Darko. But now I can’t help but wonder if the cringeworthiness matches “I feel love”
Get back to me once you’re caught up. It’s… perhaps one of the most disturbing things they’ve done yet.
I… .liked that scene.
Well, I thought it was kinda creepy, but not the most disturbing thing they have done. Heck, every scene at the Blossom home is way past that on the disturbing scale.
My reasons for voting creepier:
- Betty is supposed to be 16 years old.
- Her mother was watching.
- This was a party for her boyfriend’s father.
- That dance made her seem drugged.
- Mad World is not a sensual song, especially the Gary Jules version.
All that, plus Jughead’s facial expressions.
Saw a promo for the show while watching Black Lightning and caught a glimpse of Graham Greene. Intriguing!
This show has been a guilty pleasure of mine, so seeing that season 4 is now on Netflix I decided to start it up.
Turns out the first episode of season 4 was an extremely well-done, standalone tribute episode to Luke Perry from the perspective of Archie losing his father. Tough to watch at times but well worth it.
I semi-spontaneously started watching Riverdale on Netflix a couple weeks ago as a lighter change of pace from stuff like The Boys and Peaky Blinders. I have some fondness for the old Archie comics, music, and animated TV shows, plus I heard they attempted a Hedwig episode (one of my favorite soundtracks), so I took a dip to see if this adaptation was watchable.
And, at least for me, it totally is. I’d call it above average on the CW scale of shows. The casting overall is solid, and I appreciate the explicit recognition of the show’s “Twin Peaks meets 90210” DNA with Luke Perry and Mädchen Amick as parental figures. The series has also been willing to push into darker territory than I anticipated. I am only partway through S2 (S2E12 with Veronica’s confirmation/Pickens Day), so we will see if the show can keep its momentum after the first few big mystery story arcs have been (perhaps) resolved. So far those arcs have been key to the “one more episode” effect and keep the show from devolving into pure teen melodrama. The 42-minute episode length also keeps the binge train moving compared to most purely streaming dramas being around 60 minutes or more.
S2 was solid and S3 amped up the insanity with a D&D storyline. I’m now around 1/3 through S4 and the show is dragging a bit with its much most grounded storylines, other than the Blossom House of Horrors stuff and the brief but provocative flash forwards.
But S4E1 – that was one of the absolute best tribute episodes I have ever seen for the death of an actor/character. Heartbreaking, authentic, and fit firmly within the flow of the show. Well done, Riverdale. Maybe your town is not completely lost.
I’m still enjoying Riverdale as a not-so-guilty pleasure, and S6 just dropped on Netflix this week. I’m glad to see that they have returned to pushing the envelope and S6 is truly bonkers so far, with a 100th episode that will please any long-time Archie fan.
Is this show a drama? Yes. A musical? Sometimes. Is it horror? Yep. Is it sci-fi? Umm, sure. Is it a super hero show? Apparently! What other genres should we dip into? ALL THE GENRES.
And it’s finally done.
Well, the final and seventh season of Riverdale was unfortunately a dud, ending with barely a whimper and ripping off that Big Boat movie on the way out the door. It was the season that dared to ask the question, “What if we just did Riverdale as a regular 1950s high school Archie series?” and my answer to that is, “No, thank you.”
Season 6 would have been a good cosmic ending to the series, with maybe a one episode coda of the gang all back in 1955 due to the events of that Season 6 finale for a final bit of classic comics fan service. But doing a whole season of 1955 high school drama, stripped of almost all of the glorious insanity of the first six seasons and topped with essentially a two-part clip show ending, just didn’t register. I can appreciate what they were going for with the attempts at social commentary and sexual politics playing out with a 1950s background, but the execution just wasn’t there.
Still, I gleefully enjoyed Seasons 1-6 for the beautiful bonkers mess they were, and that’s pretty swell.
Finally finished this up and agree with everything you wrote. Even for the extremely low bar of this series season 7 was bad. It committed the sin of being boring. With ham-fisted social commentary and nods to the future such as: “I invented the word frenemies”, “I wonder if we’ll ever have a woman or black president”, and “It’d be swell if women could take a pill to control their period”.
And that ending? Really feels like they wrote themselves into a corner and didn’t care enough to figure it out - that line about being ready to move on after seven seasons from the Lodge family sendoff rings awful true. The ghost of Jughead telling Betty what happened to all of her friends was the ultimate wet fart of a wrap-up.
@Freezer-TPF has the right of it. Enjoy the six seasons of insanity - plus maybe the first episode or two of seven before it’s full 50s - and cut bait.
Hey, I’m glad someone else has been watching! A few more thoughts:
Again, let’s be thankful they did not just do a straightforward adaptation of Archie from day one, because Season 7 shows how lame that would have been.
The core cast was very solid, even if industry veteran Cole Sprouse (Jughead) occasionally seemed disinterested with the whole thing. KJ Apa could not have looked more perfect as Archie and apparently he is a Samoan chief, which is not something you typically see on a CV.
In an odd personal coincidence, this CW show pulled me in due to a musical episode (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, even though they butchered some of the songs by trimming them down in weird ways) as I noted in my first post above in this topic. The same thing happened with me and Buffy (a CW show before there was a CW) – the first episode I ever watched was the musical Once More, With Feeling!, which led me to watch the entire series from the beginning.
On that note, I wish Riverdale had given us a performance by The Archies of the iconic Sugar, Sugar. They did a clipped mashup version performed by Josie and the Pussycats early on, but I wish The Archies would have done it in a talent show or open mic at Pop’s or whatever. I appreciate that they did manage to work in The Archies song Jingle Jangle as the Riverdale street drug of choice, but I would have loved to see Archie’s band do that one, too.
I thought the final season was a mixed bag for sure.
The first few episodes were fine & probably necessary to explain the time & universe jumps. But the mid season really dragged without much direction or purpose. There was no big bad, no overarching threat apart from some vague notion about having to make this timeline “better” than the previous darker ones, so that the same (or similar) events wouldn’t transpire. Illiberalism in society was (as an umbrella) the greatest threat, but the writers didn’t do much to unify and crystalize the idea. So there were plot points and episodes about authoritarianism, censorship, limitation of civil and LGBTQ+ rights, but not much to explicitly tie those all together.
The final few episodes were better than I’d feared from the reactions you’d shared, however. The clip show memories in the next-to-last part were admittedly, really terrible, but they were also fairly short and gave way to a final episode that I much preferred. I thought that seeing the final memories of a dying Betty (with help from Jughead as the friendly crown-wearing grim reaper) was sweet.
I’m not really all that bent about whatever form the four central relationships took in this universe. The characters had been stirred together in many permutations over 7 seasons already, and those specific relationships weren’t end-game in this universe, since the “best” romantic endings went to the Cheryl / Toni and Kevin / Clay pairings. So who cares if they were in a polyamorous quad for a year, before separating to live out another happy 60+ years? 🤷♀️
Riverdale goes to Bollywood?
Woah, that looks incredible. The dialogue is really simple and cheesy but look at that set and production design and choreography! I have to see that.