Riverdale

Episode 2 was pretty good as well. Show packs a lot into a single episode both times so far. Looking forward to seeing where it all goes. Enjoying it for what it is rather than nitpicking everything that isn't classic Archie (which is quite a lot).

I haven't seen the show yet. I might watch it after the season ends, on Netflix.

The comment about so much happening in one episode worries me though. It's a trend these days, to burn through as much story as possible, in as short amount of time as possible. I see it done all the time now, and it usually doesn't work for me. I like to sink into a story. I like thee to be some room for scenes to play out and characters to have their moments. Too many shows these days burn through scenes without allowing them to breathe, and it takes away from the whole story.

Riverdale is the first of my "catch up over the summer" shows. I'm two episodes in right now. It's funny, because I thought the show had been on all season, so I was expecting 22 or 23 episodes. It seems weird that the show only has 13. I feel like I've been seeing commercials for it for much longer than that.

I don't read the comics, so I don't know the characters. What I can say so far is that the show is pretty interesting. I like the dark vibe of the series, which you wouldn't expect from an Archie series. Since I don't read the comics, I don't know whether or not the show actually needed to be related to Archie. If the tone is dramatically different, couldn't they have just made it a whole new thing?

Right now, two episodes into the series, my biggest complaint is the fact that Archie is in a relationship with his teacher. I'm over this trope on TV. It was edgy on Dawson's Creek, but now it's on every show that's set in high school, and it's getting to a point where it seems an awful lot like we're accepting this sort of behavior. On Pretty Little Liars, it's played as a true romantic relationship, rather than a form of abuse. The whole thing is really disgusting to me. I'm sure that kids love watching this stuff and imagining how mature it all is, but it's not. And we shouldn't keep telling them that it is.

But as I said, I'm only two episodes in. For all I know, the show does this story properly and shows the teacher as being manipulative, and completely in the wrong here.

Finished!

The teacher was hinted at as being a predator, but in a sort of indirect way. I would have preferred that lesson to be more firmly learned.

As for the finale, I thought it was good, but there were a few beats that felt a bit awkward.

Why would Jughead take the jacket? It didn't feel like something he'd do unless he wanted to go undercover for some reason.

Why wasn't Cheryl hospitalized? If someone I knew tried to drown herself like that, I would call 911 or take her to the hospital, not warm her up and send her on her way. Did these kids not see Thirteen Reasons Why?!

It seemed like the shot of Fred on the ground at the end was added to avoid a "Was Archie shot?" cliffhanger, but I'm not sure why. That cliffhanger was clearly set up and they should have ended with the exterior shot of the diner.

Overall, it's a fun show. I'm already wondering how long it will take for Sabrina the teenage witch to show up.

I'm really curious to see how Sabrina would work in this world. She can't be overtly magical, but she could have intuition and be a mystic type.

I guess we're about to find out how Sabrina would work.  The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is in development as a companion series.

KJ Apa, who plays Archie (one of the lead roles) was in a car accident recently (no injury other than the car itself, thank goodness), after apparently falling asleep while driving home after a 16 hour day.

One of several articles you can find about this:

http://deadline.com/2017/09/riverdale-k … 202174795/

I'm glad to hear that he is okay. My initial reaction was to wonder if he simply chose to drive himself, rather than use another production-provided method of transportation. However, Tom Welling was in a similar situation on Smallville and it took the rest of the cast writing a letter to get him a driver.

The hours are insane on these productions. I've done really crazy weeks from time to time, but then I get to take some time off and recharge. The main cast and crew don't have that luxury. Especially the crew, who work no matter who is in a scene. You can always tell the difference between the start of their work week and the end.

Normal network seasons are 22+ episodes, and that catches up to these productions very quickly, even with insane hours. Maybe the solution is to shorten seasons a little and film those seasons entirely before airing them at all, the way you see on cable and streaming services. That would relieve the scheduling pressure, but not the money pressure. I don't know if there is a great solution. It is a brutal industry to work in. They can provide drivers, but there are tons of crew members, cast members and even extras. So door to door rides aren't realistic for everyone. And even if they were, you can't force someone to sit on a bus for two hours if they want to try to drive home in five minutes. Tricky.

I'm not usually a big supporter of Hollywood union bullsh-t, but this type of situation is where they might actually come in handy.

The show is interesting, but I think it's appeal will wear off before long. The original mystery drove the show in season 1, but as with most shows, it feels like they're now stretching to keep it going. It's not really bad, but it could reach a breaking point if they're not careful.

One thing that I find weird is how teen shows are handled today. When I was younger, it wasn't as common to show kids drinking, taking drugs or having sex. It wasn't that they avoided those things, but that those things were seen as things that kid's shouldn't be doing, so it was shown less, and usually with more consequences. Today's shows treat kids like they're adults. School and parents aren't huge factors, and parents with authority are even more rare. They drink like fish, and do drugs without the writers making any fuss over it. And sex is handled with much less weight.

I'm not trying to be all square about it or anything. I'm just commenting on the way that tv writing has evolved, for better or worse.

Dawson's Creek pushed some boundaries, but when they did a story about a teacher sleeping with one of her students, it was a big deal. Today you'd have a hard time finding a high school show where a teacher isn't sleeping with a student. I'm talking about the tv landscape as a whole, not just Riverdale. If you look at a show like Pretty Little Liars, the relationship isn't even seen as a bad thing.

On Riverdale, we have a sixteen years old girl performing a striptease, and nobody seems to think that it's weird. Veronica is drinking scotch with her parents.

Teen shows have always done things that were more mature than they should, but it seems like it's become less of a teachable moment, and more of the norm.

It's also possible that my perception of these elements has changed and it's now weird for me to see someone Josie's age giving sexy performances because I'm just old. However, I did always wonder why Buffy's mother let her wear some of those short skirts back in the day.

I guess. Like I said, it's probably my change in perspective from being one of the kids, to being one of the adults. Now I'm thinking that Betty's mother should have yanked her off that stage, put a coat on her and dragged her ass home, where she would spend the next three years being grounded.

These kids today...

This would be an interesting topic, if I ever decide to start a YouTube channel. I could go back and watch some of the shows that I watched as a kid, and see if/how my perception of them has changed.

But I don't remember Brenda Walsh performing a striptease at 16, with her mother in the audience.

Are any of the characters on this show supposed to be likable anymore? This season has gone way off the deep end. It's worse than some of the crap that happened in the second season of Friday Night Lights.

I guess it's kept my interest more than some shows this year, but they just keep digging that hole deeper. At this point, Betty is a cyber-callgirl who performed a striptease for a bunch of aging bikers, and helped her prostitute brother and her mother cover up a murder... And she's the good girl on the show!

Last year, the show was dark and moody, but the core characters still seemed pretty solid. This year, Jughead is cutting skin off of a woman's arm. It's insane.

This show continues to surprise me. The recent episode of Carrie the Musical was kinda bizarre. I’m no fan of musicals, but it was okay. Only 3 episodes left of season 2.

Side note: anyone see the new Mad Magazine volume 2 #1? Has an Archie/Riverdale spoof that’s pretty hilarious.

I hope Sabrina is good. Riverdale has turned into a mess, so it'd be nice to have a good show to replace it with.

Reading ARCHIE comics is a very interesting exploration of SLIDERS-esque storytelling. ARCHIE comics have an interesting approach to continuity: there isn't any. There's a core title, ARCHIE (started in 2015 with Mark Waid writing it), featuring young adult high school dramedy with Archie being a clumsy, well-intentioned kid with a peculiar best friend in Jughead and Betty being a tomboy mechanic with an eccentric friendship with the regal and elite Veronica.

Then there's the JUGHEAD title written by Chip Zdarsky in which Jughead finds himself on a date with Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, a storyline that isn't reflected in the core ARCHIE title. When Sabrina appears in the ARCHIE title, it doesn't acknowledge her JUGHEAD plotline at all and she meets the ARCHIE cast for the first time again and is dating Archie. There's a SABRINA THE TEENAGED WITCH title in which Sabrina is in her own town, irreconcilable with ARCHIE.

Then there's the ancillary titles. BETTY AND VERONICA: VIXENS has the two girls starting a biker gang. It has a completely different version of the Betty and Veronica friendship in the main title. There's JUGHEAD: THE HUNGER in which Jughead is revealed to be part of a lineage of werewolves, hence his voracious hunger for hamburgers. It kills off a large number of the cast, it reveals Betty to be the latest in a family line of werewolf hunters; this isn't reflected in any other title. There's VAMPIRONICA, in which Veronica is transformed into a vampire and then she later travels to a parallel universe where she meets the werewolf Jughead from JUGHEAD: THE HUNGER.

There's ARCHIE VS. PREDATOR where all but two cast members are murdered by the Predator; this appears to be a series finale to the 'classic' ARCHIE comics as the surviving Betty and Veronica refer to various events in the original comics and travel into the parallel universe of the 2015 reboot.

The horror line also has CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA and AFTERLIFE WITH ARCHIE, two very dark versions of the characters which haven't been appearing regularly in comic stores as the writer has been working on RIVERDALE. Interestingly, there's a series, JUGHEAD: TIME POLICE where 2015 reboot Jughead discovers that the classic version of Jughead has become evil and been gathering Jugheads from parallel universes.

One of these Jugheads is the RIVERDALE incarnation who wears a Serpents leather jacket and delivers an overwrought monologue describing the war of Jugheads only to be interrupted when he's knocked unconscious.

What's interesting is that despite the light and dark and sci-fi variations on these titles, Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica remain the same characters, simply in different situations and with different choices before them even if those choices involve summer jobs in one universe or time and space in another.