Riverdale: Guilty Pleasures, Class Consciousness and the Death of the Small Town

The CW’s Riverdale is a prime-time dramatic serialization of the classic Archie comics they used to sell at the grocery store when you were a kid. In other words, a dark gritty reboot( We’re only a mediocre pitch away from a dark gritty Scooby-Doo reboot, aren’t we?) Cynicism aside, Riverdale is suitably corny, uneven and shameless show with a fun aesthetic and a needlessly convoluted murder-mystery plot. It’s also a surprisingly astute marker of the current political and economic climate; hinting at issues of class, feminism and even race. In 2017, it couldn’t be any other way.