Gonna write all the thoughts that are flying around in my head.
There are two consistently likable characters in this whole show and they are Mad Dog and Reggie Mantle. Betty and Toni are tolerable. Everyone else takes turns being the shitty person of the week, with Veronica and Cheryl being especially awful. They then try super hard to be endearing and good when they're not being awful human beings.
Everyone in this show is clever and conniving and capable of spinning ridiculous lies and concealing so many things and developing insane and evil machinations, except when it comes to the Farm. When faced with the Farm everyone becomes cataclysmically stupid and gullible.
This show seems like it was written by middle schoolers who think they know what high school is like. All the teenagers get involved in ridiculous plots and they basically run everything in the town of Riverdale. There are teens owning bars, teens doing vigilante work, teens running underground boxing tournaments, it's like the whole town of Riverdale and all its infrastructure and community falls on the mercy of literal 17-year-olds. I guess they did this to try to make it "dark and gritty and realistic," to raise the stakes for these teenagers, but it just makes the show ridiculous and unbelievable. All the adults are cartoonishly evil, they're all lying constantly and they're all doing bad things for the sake of being bad. And the show takes itself so seriously, except the episodes when it tries to be light-hearted and funny, in which it ends up being cringeworthy.
Characters, plot threads/ideas, and central plot elements seem to disappear and reappear whenever they want to.
The dialogue is awful. Everyone's constantly quoting Shakespeare and making pop culture references and using alliterative strings of adjectives.
Archie talks weird. He sounds like he's trying to be a Cool Dude:tm: when he talks. "Veronikyah." Shut up. He's also always sweaty.
The fucking G&G game is so stupid and it seems to only exist when the plot runs out of things to do. The Gargoyle King reveal made me laugh. It was really stupid and disappointing.
All these characters are inconsistent, but Veronica is especially bad. She constantly flips from "I love my family I want to be involved in their crime business" to "I fucking hate my family they're criminals" and it seems to just change whenever the show needs more stupid drama.
The musical episodes are really annoying and the songs they chose for this year's episode seem to have been a bit challenging for the cast. They didn't all sound super stellar.
Everyone's already talked about the "high school football" line, but god, it was really, really bad. The delivery was worse than I could've imagined.
The episode (episodes? did it last for more than one? I can't remember) where Archie and Jughead are in the middle of nowhere talking to random people was a nice bit of reprieve. A change of scenery, set in this beautiful and haunting empty town, away from the usual bullshit melodrama and ridiculous crime plots of Riverdale. But of course that couldn't last. The writers aren't good enough to let that story end naturally and bring Archie back of his own accord, nor are they patient or creative enough to introduce a new plot element/moment without instantly injecting the "Hiram Lodge owns everyone and he's evil and everyone is his cronies and everyone lies about everything" shit. They just cannot help themselves. Ruined what was honestly the best part of the season.
These actors are all really mediocre.
There's a lot of early-2000s action movie camera angles/movements/transitions and they all look like shit.
The show constantly imitates famous movies (better pieces of filmmaking) and pastiches other genres (also better than Riverdale) and references movies and shows (all of which are better) and it's extremely pretentious and very transparently an attempt to get viewers to go "oooh it's doing like a this type of thing! This episode is so unique!" even though it's still the same bullshit wrapped up in the stylistic and narrative trappings of better filmmaking that doesn't deserve to be wasted on a show like this.
Review by Kevin BeazleyBlockedParent2021-02-10T16:20:52Z— updated 2021-02-14T23:14:12Z
Gonna write all the thoughts that are flying around in my head.
There are two consistently likable characters in this whole show and they are Mad Dog and Reggie Mantle. Betty and Toni are tolerable. Everyone else takes turns being the shitty person of the week, with Veronica and Cheryl being especially awful. They then try super hard to be endearing and good when they're not being awful human beings.
Everyone in this show is clever and conniving and capable of spinning ridiculous lies and concealing so many things and developing insane and evil machinations, except when it comes to the Farm. When faced with the Farm everyone becomes cataclysmically stupid and gullible.
This show seems like it was written by middle schoolers who think they know what high school is like. All the teenagers get involved in ridiculous plots and they basically run everything in the town of Riverdale. There are teens owning bars, teens doing vigilante work, teens running underground boxing tournaments, it's like the whole town of Riverdale and all its infrastructure and community falls on the mercy of literal 17-year-olds. I guess they did this to try to make it "dark and gritty and realistic," to raise the stakes for these teenagers, but it just makes the show ridiculous and unbelievable. All the adults are cartoonishly evil, they're all lying constantly and they're all doing bad things for the sake of being bad. And the show takes itself so seriously, except the episodes when it tries to be light-hearted and funny, in which it ends up being cringeworthy.
Characters, plot threads/ideas, and central plot elements seem to disappear and reappear whenever they want to.
The dialogue is awful. Everyone's constantly quoting Shakespeare and making pop culture references and using alliterative strings of adjectives.
Archie talks weird. He sounds like he's trying to be a Cool Dude:tm: when he talks. "Veronikyah." Shut up. He's also always sweaty.
The fucking G&G game is so stupid and it seems to only exist when the plot runs out of things to do. The Gargoyle King reveal made me laugh. It was really stupid and disappointing.
All these characters are inconsistent, but Veronica is especially bad. She constantly flips from "I love my family I want to be involved in their crime business" to "I fucking hate my family they're criminals" and it seems to just change whenever the show needs more stupid drama.
The musical episodes are really annoying and the songs they chose for this year's episode seem to have been a bit challenging for the cast. They didn't all sound super stellar.
Everyone's already talked about the "high school football" line, but god, it was really, really bad. The delivery was worse than I could've imagined.
The episode (episodes? did it last for more than one? I can't remember) where Archie and Jughead are in the middle of nowhere talking to random people was a nice bit of reprieve. A change of scenery, set in this beautiful and haunting empty town, away from the usual bullshit melodrama and ridiculous crime plots of Riverdale. But of course that couldn't last. The writers aren't good enough to let that story end naturally and bring Archie back of his own accord, nor are they patient or creative enough to introduce a new plot element/moment without instantly injecting the "Hiram Lodge owns everyone and he's evil and everyone is his cronies and everyone lies about everything" shit. They just cannot help themselves. Ruined what was honestly the best part of the season.
These actors are all really mediocre.
There's a lot of early-2000s action movie camera angles/movements/transitions and they all look like shit.
The show constantly imitates famous movies (better pieces of filmmaking) and pastiches other genres (also better than Riverdale) and references movies and shows (all of which are better) and it's extremely pretentious and very transparently an attempt to get viewers to go "oooh it's doing like a this type of thing! This episode is so unique!" even though it's still the same bullshit wrapped up in the stylistic and narrative trappings of better filmmaking that doesn't deserve to be wasted on a show like this.
I hate this show. So much.