Five Things We Want To See On Riverdale

Soon, Archie Comics will be bringing their universe to The CW with Riverdale, a new teen drama executive produced by Arrow and The Flash showrunner Greg Berlanti.

We don’t know exactly when it will hit the airwaves; it migrated in from another network and The CW hasn’t yet put it on the schedule, filmed or even cast the pilot. Still, it’s one of those things that everyone is talking about.

Why? Well, because Archie Comics has been on a roll for a while. Whether it’s Afterlife With Archie and the other horror titles, its burgeoning superhero line or the reinvented world of Riverdale itself, Archie has been winning over fans and critics in recent years, culminating in the new Archie #1 marking the first time in recent memory that Archie has had a top ten-selling issue in the direct market.

So…what do we hope to see in the show? Read on…!

Romance

  

Okay, so a lot of fans like to complain about the “CW-izing” of superheroes when Arrow and The Flash put a lot of focus on their shows’ romantic subplots, but let’s be real: this is Archie.

For the most part, casual comics readers only know a few things about Archie, and one of them is the never-ending give-and-take of the Archie-Betty-Veronica love triangle.

Hell, the Life With Archie flash-forward books even depicted worlds where he married each, so that writers didn’t have to decide on a “definitive” winner in that love triangle.

So…yeah. This is where the whole will-they-or-won’t-they, who-will-he-pick thing can be milked and nobody will blame The CW for it.

…Well, almost nobody. I mean, we are talking about comic book fans.

The New Stuff

  

Most comic book properties launch in other media, and the first thing everyone says is that they have a “classic” story — usually from the Silver or Bronze Age — that they hope to see adapted on the show, before it evolves into the newer stuff that might sell well in the trade paperback market, but isn’t what made the property great.

With Archie, that’s probably not the way it’ll go.

Diversifying Riverdale — most notably with Kevin Keller, who supported a solo title for a while — has been a key part of the recent success of Archie’s Riverdale-set titles, and has provided fans with new characters to latch onto beyond the four — Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica — that everyone knew ten years ago.

And it’s not like you’ll miss much. Archie doesn’t exactly have a long, elaborate continuity/history. They’ve been in high school for decades; adding new characters to the mix just enriches the world, and it’s probably safe to assume they were there, but not on camera, the whole time, like when somebody new pops up on The Simpsons.

A wider world

  

There was a fair amount of humor in classic Archie set in school, and featuring characters outside of the small circle of friends that headline the book.

So far, we haven’t had a lot of that, really, with the first couple of issues of Archie very centered on those same handful of characters.

Let’s not just diversify in terms of race, gender and the like: let’s diversify the world of Riverdale! If you’re going to compare it to Twin Peaks, which producers have done, use Twin Peaks as a guide. There was office humor, there were people who seemed to be only tangentially-related to the series, and the town itself felt like a character.

Lets have an episode where Moose is the point-of-view character, or a subplot about Mr. Weatherbee has to deal with the challenges of being an educator in a world of mobile devices, hyper-sexualized teens and ever-increasing red tape.

Anyway, we want to see MORE of Riverdale, even though obviously we know who the leads are.

Guest stars

  

Of course, the world of Archie just wouldn’t be the same without the members of its wider, shared universe…who have supported their own films and TV shows before, so we might not get to see them.

Still, we really hope we get a look at Josie and the Pussycats, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the like.

…And, y’know. Sharknado.

Aterlife.

This is something that’s been promised already, but with a network change and everything, it’s worth mentioning:

In the early going, it was revealed that Riverdale would have annual Halloween episodes that will serve as Afterlife With Archie tales, set outside of the continuity of the show’s regular episodes a la The Simpsons‘ Treehouse of Horror specials.

Oh, please God, make this happen. The bizarre, out-of-body humor of the Afterlife concept would probably work even better in live action!