Why Archie Needs 'Riverdale' More Than 'Riverdale' Needs Archie

For the past several decades, the characters that feature in Archie Comics titles have been fixtures of the Western pop culture pantheon. Shining, smiling, wholesome but ultimately shallow beacons of an American age long gone, if it ever existed, to be sure — but fixtures nonetheless.

Stuck in a state of anachronism and innocence for 75 years, the town of Riverdale and its teenage protagonists — Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Jughead Jones, that Reggie kid and several other comers-and-goers over the years — has proved a consistent breadwinner for its publisher, generating spin-off titles, songs, films, and a whole pile of cash for a lot of people along the way.

However, I don't think it's unfair to say that, in the decade leading up to the original Archie series' cancellation in 2015, general interest in the characters and their impossibly wholesome town was on the wane. Archie Comics took steps to forestall it — in 2005, they introduced Kevin Keller, Riverdale's first openly gay student — but ultimately couldn't keep the original vision alive as it stood. So, they did what anyone would have done in their shoes: they killed Archie.

It didn't last, of course — within months they'd executed the first reboot of the Archie universe in nearly 80 years, relaunching the flagship title under writer Mark Waid and artist Fiona Staples (pictured left). The reboot was designed to bring Riverdale and its residents into the 21st century, to make way for new fans and story opportunities; the artist and writer updated character models, settings, dialogue — every aspect of the Archie mythology got an overhaul. (Staples left the book after issue three; consequent artists have included Annie Wu, Veronica Fish, Thomas Pitilli, Ryan Jampole, Joe Eisma and Pete Woods.)

It worked brilliantly, on paper. The book has received broad acclaim among the comic-book press, with gushing reviews from IGN, Den Of Geek and Comic Book Resources, while articles were being written at the time talking about how hot Archie had suddenly become.

All of which makes it somewhat odd that, two years later, everyone seems so surprised that Riverdale — the new take on the Archie-verse, via Twin Peaks and Stand By Me, as filtered through the teen-drama sensibilities of The CW — features a hot Archie. Of course it features a hot Archie. Archie has been hot for a while now. The hotness shouldn't be the cause for consternation here.

The question isn't "Why is Archie attractive?" — it's "Why is Archie there at all?"

The truth of the matter is that Riverdale needs Archie (KJ Apa) far less than Archie needs Riverdale. On the surface, Riverdale — at least as far as I can tell from its pilot episode, currently streaming on Netflix — is an enjoyable, likely above-average neo-noir coming-of-age-cum-small-town-murder-mystery that wears its Lynchian tendencies proudly, and I'm extraordinarily keen to see where it's going. It just so happens to have Archie characters in it.

In fact, creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has had no qualms openly admitting to the show's ties to Twin Peaks' aesthetic, among other hat-tips: in an interview with The AV Club, the Archie Comics chief creative officer also name-checked Joseph Gordon-Levitt film Brick as a key influence, along with Stand By Me, River's Edge and Blue Velvet, while downplaying any through-lines to Dawson's Creek or The OC. All of those films and shows say a lot more about what sort of show Aguirre-Sacasa is trying to make, or not make, than Riverdale's connection to one of the US's oldest comic books. Honestly, the show would stand just fine on its own two legs without that anchor.

So, what is in it for Riverdale? Well, a degree of guaranteed recognition and loyalty from its audience, most likely; that sense of existing cultural value and investment that comes along with characters that have existed in the public consciousness for any considerable length of time.

I hear you — if the characters are so far removed from their original selves as presented throughout the 20th century, what recognition or investment is there to cling to in the first place? Plenty. As I've mentioned, comic-book readers have been familiar with a more modern and mature Riverdale for a while now. Moreover, a bunch of formerly more innocent franchises — Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo, Wacky Races and The Flintstones — have all received the 'grown-up' treatment in the comics medium over the past year, and that's yielded nothing but entertaining results, even if Scooby talks through a technologically advanced collar now, or if Fred Flintstone is a depressed war veteran. In other words, these may not be the characters as we remember them, but they're perfectly valid interpretations nonetheless.

Consider the fact that, after one episode, Jughead (Cole Sprouse) is probably already my favourite character simply because Jughead was my favourite character in the comics. He's done nothing yet but dabble in Gossip Girl territory as the show's narrator, but because he's wearing a crown hat (I cannot believe they got that to work), I care about him more than I would an entirely new character without any pre-existing context, especially after a single episode.

That recognition also informs and subverts other narrative elements, such as his fractured friendship with Archie, as well as the dynamic between the trio of Archie, Betty (Lili Reinhart) and Veronica (Camila Mendes). It really wasn't necessary for the main characters to have the names and looks that they do — they could be literally any group of teenagers on the planet, for how crucial the franchise connection actually feels to the overall story developing underneath — but the fact that they do imbues the show with a welcoming warmth that it may not have otherwise carried, and so I'm already more interested to find out what happens to them over the rest of the season as a result of that base familiarity. From that perspective, the characters' inclusion is actually a pretty savvy move.

So, no, Riverdale didn't need to be an Archie story, but it may very well benefit from his presence, and that of his friends (and Luke Perry), after all.

New episodes of Riverdale are released weekly on Netflix.