Riverdale is probably the worst TV show I’ve ever watched. Consistently, character motivations are a tempestuous mystery; plot lines are cliché to the extreme. The number of times I’ve paused the show to scream with mirth or agony is far from zero—and yet Riverdale was renewed for a second season six episodes into its first. In 2018, it won the People’s Choice Award for Favourite TV Drama. It’s won the Teen Choice Award for best drama two years running. The 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards even nominated Riverdale for Show of the Year.
I think we can all agree that Riverdale won’t be winning an Emmy any time soon, but this much is clear: people love it. They can’t get enough of teen sex, gang warfare, and parent drama drudged up twenty years after the fact. They watch with enthusiasm as K.J. Apa, Cole Sprouse, Lili Reinhart and Camila Mendes ruin my Archie Comics childhood week after week with angst and grit. Most people in my bubble of the world are aware that the dialogue is wooden, the acting leaves much to be desired, and the plot is ludicrous at worst and nonsensical at best. So why oh why do people watch Riverdale?
Here in the UVic Writing department where I’m pursuing a bachelor’s, we place a lot of emphasis on whether a work is literary. Is it high in quality and artistic value? Does it depict and evoke human emotion in a realistic way? Could you imagine The New Yorker declaring it the best thing since sliced bread on a book? If not, it’s probably trash. And to the viewers of Riverdale, that couldn’t matter less.
I’m here to make the argument that Riverdale is not highly popular in spite of its trashiness—that its cliché-studded landscape is excused from criticism because of some unknown redeeming quality, like its lighting or ability to butcher teen slang—but precisely because of that trashiness.
People love drama. That’s why reality TV shows like The Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and Real Housewives are so popular. That’s why people continually turn to soap operas, despite a near universal agreement that they are the epitome of trash. And since Riverdale is nothing if not dramatic, it’s no surprise that people return to it week after week. The regular high school drama—the football team’s big game, power politics in the cheer squad, the student council election—is all there, of course. The small-town aspect brings in the parents’ decades-old grudges that are somehow still relevant. And the murder mystery/biker gang/life-altering board game part keeps things interesting.
But that’s just it: Riverdale is interesting. When we watched the show, my roommate and I kept coming back to find out who was murdering sinners in Riverdale, what Veronica’s dad’s latest shady business venture was, if Jughead would ever learn to touch a girl properly. These questions, while intriguing, are not world changing. They do not examine the human experience for the why and how, like great literature proclaims to. Watching Riverdale has not changed my perspective on humanity (except in that I now question the collective taste of our species).
The hard truth is that popular media isn’t always popular because it’s meaningful or ground breaking, or even necessarily good. People enjoy media first and foremost because it’s entertaining. We like to immerse ourselves in the stories of other, fictional people, often with sexier problems than paying the rent and passing their classes. We imagine ourselves in the shoes of these way-too-hot teenagers, solving murders and joining gangs, and feel some relief. At least my mom didn’t have a secret child and hide it from me. At least I don’t have to choose between football and guitar.
While I may not watch Riverdale anymore (some freaky shit goes down in season three), I’ll still listen to my roommate read aloud Wikipedia summaries. I’ll glance at the BuzzFeed articles. Why?
Because Riverdale is trash and that’s why we love it.