Why Riverdale Will No Longer Be In My DVR
Like many Archie fans, I was excited to check out Riverdale when it first premiered. But after the third episode, I can no longer support it in good faith.
Based on the all-American Archie comics, Riverdale was, from the get go, going to be measured against some pretty high standards. Many attempts have been made, in the past, to bring the all-American teens to life — going back to the 1980’s, in fact, when the late Corey Haim was due to star as Archie in a never-made series. And though other shows, in the past, featured characters that were based on characters that appeared in the Archie series (like Sabrina the Teenage Witch), the actual teens of Riverdale High remained confined to the pages of our comic books.
So when Riverdale premiered, and promised to be a “grown up” version of our beloved characters, I, like many others, was intrigued. No longer the fresh faces of Americana in a time long gone — if, in fact, that time ever existed — Riverdale thrust Archie Andrews (played, ably enough, by newcomer KJ Apa) and the gang in the middle of a murder plot involving Jason Blossom, better known as one-half of the Blossom Twins, who debuted in the comics in 1982 and had a Lannister-ian relationship before Jamie and Cersei Lannister were even a twinkle in George R.R. Martin’s eye.
Pop culture icons of the 1990s, such as Luke Perry, who plays Fred Andrews, Archie’s “everyman” father, round out the cast of mostly newcomers. The sole teen star of Riverdale who isn’t new to audiences is Cole Sprouse, who, with his twin brother Dylan, starred in the Disney Channel’s classic show The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. His Jughead Jones s a “lone wolf” character, that also serves as the narrator. (For what it’s worth, he’s also the strongest of all the teen actors.)
So, on the surface, Riverdale has all the right ingredients. Unfortunately, it went horribly, horribly wrong, and very quickly.
1. Betty Cooper and her response to the Riverdale ship
Shipping is a fact of most fandoms. So when the LGBTQ Riverdale fans launched a Beronica — Betty and Veronica — ship, the response was a collective “meh.” As in, “sure, why not. Whatever floats your boat.”
Except there was one person who seemed to have a problem with this: Lili Reinhart, who plays Betty Cooper on Riverdale.
While it’s well within Reinhart’s right to tell people to respect her boundaries. After all real life shipping (that is shipping actors as if you were unable to distinguish them from their characters is on the wrong side of the creepy line) it’s the words that she chose to address the shipper group that were problematic.
As she told Hollywood Life: “There’s a group that very, very much wants it. They’re soulmates in a friends’ way. Our show is not meant to be fan fiction. We give them a taste of it when they kiss, but that’s all it is.”
You can name the “group” by what they are, Lili: LGBTQ youth. It’s okay.
But, of course, Lili may not have meant anything bad, necessarily, by her choice of words. As a young actress, especially one that’s new to the level of publicity that Riverdale brings, who perhaps hasn’t had the proper media training to guide her words and her choices appropriately, perhaps she simply misspoke (even though, in fairness, she has yet to clarify or correct her statements).
Fair enough. But then there’s another issue, one that’s even more disturbing.
2. Archie’s Rape
There is no nice way to put this. There is no possible way to make this pretty. There are trigger warnings galore with what I’m about to say.
But it’s an ugly, albeit obvious, truth: Archie is being raped.
According to RAINN, “As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape. About 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. 1 out of every 10 rape victims are male.” (Male victims are also less likely to report their rapes than their female counterparts.)
Never mind that he “consented” to having sex with Ms. Grundy. The fact is, he is a minor, and he cannot consent. Furthermore, the relationship between Ms. Grundy and Archie — even assuming he’s of the age of consent, which he isn’t — is inherently exploitative. The power dynamic is imbalanced from the start. And this is treated, not as something to be prosecuted, but as a “hot for teacher” moment between Archie and a way-sexed-up Ms. Grundy (who is portrayed as an elderly widow in the comics).
The only one who recognizes that relationship for the exploitative mess that it is, is Jughead. And the fact that Riverdale dismisses this relationship as little more than a “sexy secret” rather than the clearly problematic situation that it is does a great disservice to the male victims of rape. Why is it hard to depict Ms. Grundy as a sexual predator — because she’s pretty? Because she’s young? Because she’s white? What’s the problem here, Riverdale?
3. Chuck Clayton, Sexual Predator
It was inspiring to see Veronica team up this week with other victims of the football team’s clearly disgusting practice of going on dates with women, only to suggest afterwards that the date went much farther than it did. (This happens all too often in high school, perhaps most infamously in the Steubenville High School rape case) And we all got a big kick out of girl power “exacting revenge” on the perpetrators. But why did Riverdale have to make Chuck Clayton, one of the few people of color starring in a primetime soap aimed at teens, the initial perpetrator of the sexual violence against Veronica?
This is not something as minor as “not adhering to canon”. (Chuck Clayton, in the comics, is a bit of a Lothario, but a good-natured all-American football player nonetheless). This is pushing a trope of black men as perpetrators of sexual violence.
And as the current political climate, and our country’s own violent, racist history has proven, this trope of the “scary black men from whom we must protect our women” has deadly consequences. At the very least, Riverdale‘s choice of making Chuck Clayton the sexual predator is tone-deaf.
Slate puts it best:
"“Behind the myth of black rapists was an elemental fear of black autonomy, often expressed by white Southern leaders who unhesitatingly connected black political and economic power to sexual liaison with whites. “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will,” said Sen. Benjamin Tillman on the Senate floor in 1900. “We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” It’s tempting to treat Dylann Storm Roof as a Southern problem, the violent collision of neo-Confederate ideology and a permissive gun culture. The truth, however, is that his fear—of black power and of black sexuality—belongs to America as much as it does the South."
Put simply: I have four nephews. Three of them are young black boys that will, eventually, grow up to be young black men. For their sake, and for the sake of other aunts, mothers, sisters, and cousins of young black boys that will, one day, be black men, I cannot, in good faith, patronize a show like Riverdale that, all its other problems aside, portrays them as the default perpetrator of sexual violence.
Next: Riverdale Meets ‘Sweet/Vicious:’ Girls Revenge Against Slut Shaming
The Archie comics debuted in 1939. It’s now 2017. Do better, Riverdale.