Was Riverdale camp?

Tia Glista sends off one of the weirdest shows on television.

The CW drama Riverdale can be summed up by its most viral scene: Jughead (Cole Sprouse) whines, “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.” Jughead, one of the show’s protagonists, is embarrassingly emphatic, as are the writers, who nod toward the rules of their own diegesis—this is Jughead’s ‘bit,’ and they are committed to it. They are also right about something else: even in the nonsensical landscape of teen dramas, Riverdale is a weirdo, and as its seven seasons wrapped up this month, it feels accurate to say that there will never be another show like it, a show full of epic highs and lows, a show so audacious and unhinged that it warrants more meaningful attention than it has thus far received.

Scraps of Riverdale float around the Internet, but most of the adults I know stopped watching years ago, somewhere between the revelation that Betty’s dad was a serial killer and the arrival of an organ-harvesting cult. What began as a present-day adaptation of the Archie comics evolved into an onslaught of murder mysteries, prison breaks, ritual sacrifices, government conspiracies, mob conflicts, bear fights, musicals, time travel, urban planning, quests for the Holy Grail, and Armageddon. It has been a grab bag of every possible dramatic scenario known to the screen, compiled so randomly that the result is absolutely delicious—in fact, Riverdale is an exemplary postmodern text, prone to self-consciousness, intertextuality, and Camp.

GET CAUGHT UP