Everything You Need To Know About The Archieverse
Welcome to the Archieverse. Yes, it is a thing.
Thanks to Archie Comics chief creative officer and Archieverse showrunner Roberto Aguirre Sacasa, we are about to enter a world with not one, not two, but THREE TV shows set within the Riverdale universe.
As Betty Cooper once sang while stripping in front of a bar full of gang members and her mother, “it’s a very, very mad world”.
To help you make sense of it, here’s the lowdown on each of the series, where you can watch them in Australia, and how they all tie together…
Riverdale
The granddaddy of them all.
Riverdale started in 2017 and is now into its fourth season. Offering up a modern, ~gritty~, occasionally musical and always deeply weird take on the core Archie characters, Riverdale is truly a wild ride.
So far on the show, Archie has angsted over choosing between football and music, become a vigilante (more than once), joined the mob, gone to jail, escaped from jail, been attacked by a bear, mourned the death of his father, and been shirtless approximately 2067 times.
Meanwhile, Veronica owns Pop’s and the speakeasy underneath it (that is somehow a viable business run primarily by and for teenagers???). Betty Cooper discovered her dad is a serial killer and that she has the “serial killer gene”, watched her mum and sister join a cult, discovered her mum wasn’t actually in the cult, lost a fake half brother and found a real one and investigated way more deaths than any teenager should.
Jughead? Well, he’s a weirdo, a writer, an investigator, a gang leader (???) and now he goes to some fancy school.
That’s without even getting into the cray cray that is Cheryl Blossom and her wacky family of half-dead, secretly dead, not-really-dead and definitely-dead-and-rotting-corpse relatives.
It’s A LOT, and yet somehow we can’t look away. If you want to watch or rewatch the gang’s adventures, Netflix Australia releases episodes weekly as they air in the US.
Season 4 will be back from hiatus with Episode 10 on January 23. And if you’re interested in the expanded universe, make sure you’re watching — Season 4, Episode 12, dropping on Netflix on February 6, will be a Katy Keene crossover episode (more on that in a sec).
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
This is Riverdale’s first spin-off, taking place in the town across Sweetwater River, Greendale.
It’s a much darker take on the peppy Sabrina characters we all know from the ‘90s show. The main plot of Season 1, Part 1 involved Sabrina Spellman trying to decide whether or not to have her Dark Baptism, which would mean leaving behind her mortal friends and boyfriend Harvey Kinkle, and pledging her eternal loyalty to the Dark Lord, aka Satan himself.
Part 2 got even more intense, with Sabrina and her friends trying to prevent the literal end of the world from happening.
Yes, all this is going down right across the river from the town of Riverdale. The characters in each show have referenced the other town a lot, and while there are lots of little Easter eggs in CAOS for Archie comics fans, there’s been no proper crossover. Yet.
Except for one small one, which is super confusing and weird.
In Season 3 of Riverdale, a minor character called Ben Button appeared to die as a result of playing Gryphons and Gargoyles. But he showed up in Greendale, in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, AFTER that.
It was only one brief scene, in which he played a pizza delivery guy. Some fans speculated that it meant that Season 1 of CAOS takes place before Season 3 of Riverdale. The problem with this theory is that it’s implied that Ben Button died in CAOS, too. So did he die twice? Or did he not die on Riverdale? Or did he escape on CAOS?
Showrunner Roberto Aguirre Sacasa didn’t help the mystery, offering up that Ben’s appearance on CAOS “suggests a very deep, deep mythology where time and space bends. It seemed like it was pretty final, but yet there he is in Greendale. But in Greendale, everyone pops up — the dead don’t stay dead long in Greendale.”
Sure.
Unlike Riverdale, which comes out weekly, CAOS drops in bingeable chunks on Netflix. All of Season 1 is currently available to watch, and the first part of Season 2 (Part 3 of the overall show) will drop on January 24.
Katy Keene
The newest addition to the Archiverse family!
As I mentioned above, there’ll be a crossover episode between Katy Keene and Riverdale, and then the following day Katy Keene will premiere in the US. Here’s the thing: Katy Keene is set five years in the future!
Presumably, the Riverdale episode will introduce present-day Katy, an aspiring fashion designer, as a friend of Veronica’s from New York, and she’ll then befriend the rest of the gang, enabling their future selves to pop up on Katy Keene if and when the storyline suits.
We know at the very least that this will be the case for Josie McCoy, who is actually making the jump from being largely ignored on Riverdale to being a main cast-member on Katy Keene.
Katy Keene is airing weekly on The CW in the US (the same network that Riverdale airs on there). Unfortunately there’s been no news on which network or streaming service will air it in Australia. Here’s hoping it gets revealed soon!
Jenna Guillaume is a Sydney-based writer who loves all things TV and pop culture. She tweets @JennaGuillaume, and her new book, ‘What I Like About Me’ is available now.