![]() A lot of the derision stemmed from the misconception that Aguirre-Sacasa had attempted to make a normal TV show and failed, where in actuality he had set out to create something bizarre, uninhibited and specific to great success. (Cardi B threatens to “dog walk” Tomi Lahren on Twitter, and three months later, the phrase comes out of Veronica’s mouth, probably appended by her trademark utterance of “daddy”.) The distinct manner of speech made the program a perennial laughingstock on social media, its juiciest soundbites posted without context for the gawking masses. Not since the Dubya-years heyday of the original Gossip Girl has television bore witness to dialogue like this, a pidgin language of baroque purple prose, Charles Nelson Reilly-level innuendo, eclectic pop culture allusions and youth-geared online-native slang. Where Ryan Murphy believes in and craves prestige, the showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa staunchly refuses to take his work seriously, venturing deeper into his insular funhouse with the express purpose of getting lost. The similarly excessive, queer-inflected American Horror Story has illustrated the difficulty of sustaining an outrageous standard, and that was with the anthological benefit of an annual reset Riverdale stayed lively by finding pleasure in its own preposterousness. ![]() Whenever the action threatened to slow down, the staffers would just introduce some new twist or non sequitur plot device. The haphazard structuring sometimes stagnated the momentum of a season (and called attention to how few hourlong series still run for 22 episodes at a time), but whatever its missteps, the unending parade of camp never once committed the cardinal sin of being boring. From one week to the next, it barely adhered to its own topsy-turvy sense of internal logic, freely disposing of characters or subplots whenever they might get in the way of the next reinvention. ![]() There’s no such thing as going over the top on Riverdale, a show that rejected the basic notion of a top as it kept rising up and up into the stratosphere of lunacy. Cheryl Blossom arrived on the scene as the one-liner-spitting queen bee at Riverdale high, spent a while as a Grey Gardens-style shut-in, pivoted to a sapphic demi-deity, and will soon end her arc as the leader of an all-girl squad of greasers circa 1955. The mission drift from the first season’s purview of classroom intrigue blossomed into an absurd running joke, with life-and-death, fate-of-the-planet stakes often contrasted against despair over unrequited crushes or stress about prom. Over the six-season broadcast run concluding with this Wednesday’s finale, members of the good-time gang went to war, escaped from a derelict mental asylum, traveled through time, hopped across multiple dimensions, braved the treacherous terrain of undergrad creative writing seminars, developed and kicked drug addiction, maneuvered through corporate espionage, staged multiple musicals, joined the FBI, made the acquaintance of Andy Cohen, and learned to appreciate the epic highs and lows of high-school football. Archie did much more than share a steamy car hookup with his teacher Miss Grundy in the pilot.
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