TV

‘Riverdale’ Is The Campest Binfire Show On TV And If You Aren’t Watching It, You’re A Coward

What other show has had multiple evil-twin storylines, the hottest lesbian couple in history, a cult leader played by Chad Michael Mucking Murray, MULTIPLE serial killers, and plotlines that split and twist and forget themselves, only to be reforged like farty phoenixes from the BINFIRES of HELL?

by Eloise Grills  16 May 2019
Riverdale review

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Why the hell aren’t you watching Riverdale?

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It seems like every other day some pissy bitch on Twitter cries a pathetic little river about how “all the good teen shows are gone”: that we no longer have the OC, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, Gossip Girl or some stupid other high-fibre intelligent television puffing out of TV’s swollen arsehole each week.

To them I say, where in hell are you on a Thursday afternoon when I am on the frontline, week after week, in my undies screaming at the fake teen antics in a little town known as Riverdale?

Tell me, what other show has had multiple evil-twin storylines, the hottest lesbian couple in history (hello Choni), a cult leader played by Chad Michael Mucking Murray, MULTIPLE serial killers, and plotlines that split and twist and forget themselves, only to be reforged like farty phoenixes from the BINFIRES of HELL every other week?

What other gasoline-fight-accident-of-a-show features MULTIPLE homoerotic displays of campy wrestling violence and sexual tension between a teenage boy and his gf’s father for some reason???

Only the stupidly stinking, inexplicably compelling, trash-incinerator that is Riverdale!

So let’s put on our best Forever 21 outfit, sit down in our favourite booth at La Bonne Nuit, drink a dumb-sounding mocktail, and you can listen to all my obviously sensible and deeply studied reasons as to why Riverdale is the hot teen mess that we, the trashbags of the universe, deserve.

Reason 1 And Obviously The Most Important Reason: Choni

Never have we seen a hotter lesbian on TV, or anywhere, than Cheryl Blossom. And never have we seen a hotter TV romance and a worse couple name than Choni.

Cheryl Blossom is the cherry-lipstick-lesbian-cheerleader-bitch-goddess of our dreams!

Her evolution from cheertator in the first season, to bereaved sister, to proud arsonist of her homophobic mother’s mansion to TORTURING her homophobic mother with maple syrup, shooting a serial killer with a freaking BOW and ARROW — shows that we do not deserve such beauty in the universe.

Cheryl’s queerness in the show was buried in the subtext for a long time, before Toni Topaz, the extremely hot, grungy Serpent came on the scene. Since they have been together, they have had maybe TWO sex scenes (NOT ENOUGH), Cheryl has been inducted into the Serpents and given her own CHERRY RED SERPENT JACKET (when I saw it I literally screamed) and created a hot dyke biker girl gang for Toni called the PRETTY POISONS.

I don’t even know where I was going with this but I need a glass of water and a lie- down. Choni are super hot but they are in a cult at the moment and I really really hope they get deprogrammed and emerge just as sexy. And also safe.

Stay tuned.

 This Show’s Plots Are SO Half-Baked They Could Be Written By A Thousand Monkeys At One Thousand Typerwriters In The Time It Takes Me To Say “Fizzle Rocks”

 To say that the writing in this show is Class-A balderdash to be snorted up your nose until your brain melts is an understatement.

In fact, one of my favourite pastimes to sit down a non-Riverdale-watcher, or as I like to call them, a traitor, and get them to watch a few episodes while I attempt to narrate what the fuck is going on.

And you know what?? I think you need to actually be a member of Dumbass Teen MENSA to unravel this exquisite bullshit.

Ten minutes into an episode and I’m tongue-tied trying to explain who the Serpent gang is and what they do, and what beef they have with the Ghoulies, who deal drugs, because the Serpents don’t deal drugs (but seriously: they are a gang so what do they do?).

The show follows Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica, teen heartthrobs played by twenty-five year old actors with forty-year-old parents, as they sort of go to school but mostly drink milkshakes: solve mysteries re: cagey gangs, drug barons, fake deaths and incest, wrestle live bears, try to figure out who a serial killer called the “Black Hood” is, escape the Sisters of Quiet Mercy– who run a gay-praying-away nunnery on the edge of town which uses drugs to control children.

I’ll just leave that one there.

Also, there are mass seizures, people visited by the dead in this cult called the Farm run by some weirdo called “Edward Evernever” played by Chad Michael Murray, there’s a gangster called Poppa Poutine (lolol), and also the entire town gets quarantined and no one in the whole country seems to care??

No But Seriously What Is This Show About?

All these empty plot points are somehow related to this stupid RPG “Gryphons and Gargoyles” that has led to the deaths and suicides of drug-addled teens across town, controlled by a shadowy figure that looks like a lost set piece from True Detective, The Gargoyle King.

If you’d thought that there would be like, a special taskforce investigating these deaths, think again: it’s up to Betty and Jughead to unravel this labyrinthine and genuinely terrifying plot.

It doesn’t stop there.

Veronica calls her Mafioso father “Daddy” every episode while complaining that he is “mobsplaining” to her. Betty has an alternate identity known as Dark Betty who sometimes shows up in bondage-wear and “tortures” men by basically having threesomes with them.

In one episode Jughead vengefully carves a Serpent tattoo off a woman’s arm and then everything is hunky-dory and it never comes up again, because Jughead is a Betty’s heartthrob and if there’s one thing that this show loves more than unreasonable horrific violence it’s chintzy teenage love.

I mean, when the show-runner is on Twitter being this effusive with emojis, you know something’s up.

Daddy And Mummy Goals

This show is filled to the brim with 80s teen stars.

If you’re as old and as horny as I am, you will see this cast as something of a hot hasbeens episode of This is Your Life.

We’ve got Shelly from Twin Peaks, Skeet Ulrich from Scream (also known as the really sexy murderer boyfriend) the small penis guy from Scary Movie, Molly Ringwald, Luke Perry from 90210 (RIP), Robin Givens, also some people from like All My Children or something… and let me tell you they have all aged like fine wine that I want to pour all over my tits.

Case closed.

It’s Got More Homoeroticism Than Rock Hudson’s Home Movies 

Let me just start by saying: Archie Andrews and Hiram Lodge NEED to BONE if only to dis(Lodge) whatever is lurking in this show’s subconscious before it implodes.

If there’s one thing that Archie Andrews, the fire-crotched lead (allegedly) of the show is more obsessed by than his gorgeous brunette gf, Veronica Lodge, it’s her gangster father, for some reason.

In the show, despite all the evidence slapping him homo-erotically in the face that he IS evil, (he plots to kill pretty much everyone, exploits Archie and tries to kill him/gets him imprisoned for murder) Archie cannot for the life of him stop trying to wrestle/bone Hiram.

In the second season, as The Black Hood is hunting down everyone who he believes is morally impure, Hiram encourages Archie to form a vigilante group called the Red Circle, who are supposed to intimidate the hell out of this serial killer.

Instead they release what I would hazard to call the gayest video ever presented in a teen show.

Also, the parents! The dads! The hot dads banding together to fight the evil dad!!! Hot Dad on Dad Action!  I can’t breathe!

Watch Riverdale, You Snivelling Cowards!

This show is not for the faint hearted.

It’s not for people who don’t want to be completely swept away by soap opera hysteria, agonising sexual tension, plotlines so tangled that they hurt, like your armpit hair when it gets caught on your sleeve.

But if you believe in a little thing called love, if you believe in teenagers doing whatever they want whenever they want with no logic to it, if you believe in Fizzle Rocks, Grind’em hook-ups, Glamergé eggs, characters who forget who they are one scene to the next, and more fun than you can point a Gargoyle King’s stick at, then slurp it up while you still have a chance.

Because too much of a good thing isn’t wonderful; it’s Riverdale.

Eloise Grills is an award-winning writer, comics artist and poet. Their debut poetry collection, If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams, is forthcoming with Subbed In.