The Disaster Series: A 'Celebration' Of The Kind Of Show That Make My Job Horrible: Riverdale

 

I have concentrated a lot of effort in this column about series that I consider overrated. However, I need to make it clear that for the lion’s share of those series, I could at least see the point for their existence, even if I did not appreciate or comprehend the fascination.

I have also in the past, occasionally realized that many of these series I considered overrated redeemed themselves in their final seasons or episodes. Those of you who’ve read my columns know that I realized I was mistaken about Succession and that the series finales of Ray Donovan and Scandal led me to believe I might have redeemed the series. These are not the shows; however, this particular group of columns will be about.

No what I want to discuss are the kind of shows that can enjoy an extended run on what is a fundamentally flawed premise from the start, consistently get worse as their run goes on, and then come to a conclusion that makes the viewer wonder why they wasted their time on them. I have a feeling that many of you know the kind of series that I’m discussing.

Now I have to admit that in my experience by far the biggest offender of this is Shonda Rhimes. Even if How to Get Away With Murder wasn’t essentially a plagiarism of a better series it had a concept that would barely have worked for half a season, much less six. Scandal might have been able to redeem itself in the last two episodes but I’m still not sure those made up for having to go through all six seasons of it. And Grey’s Anatomy went off the rails so early in its run that I don’t think there is any point in the last decade where it could have ended and you could have called it a good show.

To be fair, I feel the same way of much of Seth MacFarlane’s work. I realize the animated series shouldn’t fall under the same guidelines as live-action, but I’ve never found any of his series anything other than mean-spirited, unpleasant and not even close to clever. I honestly think South Park’s opinion of Family Guy was dead on.

But MacFarlane and Rhimes did not start this trend. It’s far more likely that it began in the era of Must-See-TV during NBC’s era of dominance in the 1990s. There were far too many inane, unimaginative comedies over that period that lasted episodes, much less seasons too long. They were star-vehicles where you genuinely wonder why the star was bothering with the effort. I speak of shows like Suddenly Susan, Veronica’s Closet and Caroline in the City, shows that I remember watching but I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would even keep watching for a minute, even if they came after Seinfeld or Friends. Other networks were guilty of these crimes: I speak of shows like Two and a Half Men, which I never found funny nor interesting, According to Jim, which really made me question what ABC was doing keeping it on the air when Lost and Desperate Housewives were there and, basically, half the ‘comedies’ that were on the WB or the UPN through much of their runs.  They might be steps forwards for certain major entertainers, but I guarantee you Jamie Foxx really doesn’t want you to remember his WB series.

In the era of Peak TV, thankfully, the days of these series are almost entirely behind us. (Though we’re still not there yet: no one will ever convince me that Euphoria is a work of art no matter how many prizes Zendaya ends up winning.) Sadly as long as broadcast television keeps making TV we will sadly be victim of these kinds of shows that go on far too long even though you can’t figure out why they were created in the first place. In a sense this series is ‘inspired’ by the fact that two of the biggest offenders have come to an end this year. I am slightly ashamed to say that I spent far too much time watching both of these shows and am not only astonished that I thought they were worth my time, looking back on it I’m kind of amazed anyone else did either. Perhaps that says more about me than these particular shows but I think given how many of them ended we all might feel the same way. Not only that we wasted our time watching these series, but why so many other more promising shows ended up being sacrificed over the years so that these shows could continue to exist.

I will begin this series with a show I spent two and a half years watching before giving up on it, kept hearing weirder and weirder storylines  that made me wondered what the point was and then ended in such a way that I can’t imagine any viewer who spent the better part of a seven years following it wondering how many other great series began and ended during this period that I ignored for this one. I am speaking of Riverdale

 

 

 

Riverdale

A Series So Wretched It Never Entered So Bad It’s Good Territory

 

I have a great deal of empathy in my soul for people, even celebrities.  I believe that the Internet has turned into such a toxic wasteland that so many truly great performers have their lives destroyed online simply because they or the characters they play on TV and film are violations of the overwhelming white male voice of fandoms. And my heart truly aches for all the women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community whose careers and lives have been made the fodder of hatred and disparagement over the years.

When Candace Patton revealed how much hate mail she received for playing Iris West on The Flash I feel wretched that an actress who was part of a hit series for nearly a decade could not enjoy her success. When Ruby Rose’s role on Batwoman was first torched online and behind the scenes I was appalled at how so many people turned on someone because they did not fit the model for a series. It enraged me that Brie Larson was turned into a monster because Marvel fans hated that a woman was chosen to play Captain Marvel.  And when I learned that Katherine Heigl’s once promising career in TV and film was torpedoed because she refused to submit for Emmy consideration a storyline that involved her having sex with the ghost of her dead lover, it made me admire her for her integrity.

My compassion, however, can only be stretched so far.  And when I heard that in the weeks prior to Riverdale, lead actresses Camilla Mendes and Lili Reinhart wanted audiences to laugh with them and not at them, my reaction was two words: “Okay, millennial.” Because if ever there was a series that smacked of the entitlement of this generation as well as being among the absolute nadir of the repercussions of Peak TV, it is Riverdale, a show so tonally bizarre, so out-of-control with such utterly unbelievable and unrealistic characters and a lack of restraint that makes Euphoria look like Downton Abbey.   

I admit that I abandoned the show after just two and a half seasons, which by my estimation was at least three years to long to have spent time watching it. But given the storylines I have heard since I mercifully refused to keep going with it, the ridiculous twists in the plot, and the unwillingness of the writers to commit with the same story not merely from season to season but episode to episode, I fully understand why it has been the subject of such relentless on-line mockery almost since the start. Indeed, when it comes to Riverdale, I feel that online shaming is not nearly sufficient.  I don’t know what punishment would fit the crime of creating this series, but if I were to have my druthers, everyone connected with the show, cast, writers and directors, would have to spend the rest of their careers on an apology tour of every other show that got cancelled the years that Riverdale was still on the air, as well as to spend the rest of their time being questioned by every single critic to go, scene by scene should they choose, why we should not spend eternity mocking every decision Riverdale made in its run. “Now would you mind explaining the viewer should not have mocked the scene where Veronica showed up to the Riverdale Prison with the cheerleading squad to sing ‘Jailhouse Rock’? Please explain the logic to introduce superpowers to the show. Why did you choose musical episodes and what high school do you think would start with Carrie?

To be clear I did devoted nearly two and a half seasons to watching Riverdale and gave it far too much rope to hang itself with during that period.  When it went on hiatus in the fall of 2018 I had every intention of returning to it but by that point I had started watching Schooled,  the charming and wistful Goldbergs spinoff that was cancelled too. Then again, perhaps my brain was sending out warning signs that Riverdale, which at this point was still sticking to a vague internal logic, was about to enter full on crazy town.

So I left and was spared revelations about ‘The Gargoyle King’, Jughead faking his own death to infiltrate a ‘secret society’,  a seven year time jump near the end of Season 4, a series of murders that might have involved alien abductions but turned out to involve organ theft and the increasing introduction of the supernatural into the series as if everything that was happening in Riverdale wasn’t weird enough on its own. I only learned about many of these storylines recently and frankly I don’t think my mind could have handle one of them, much less all of them. Any single one would have been enough to jump a shark; Riverdale seems to have had enough to jump the entire Jaws franchise.

But all of that paled to what happened in the final season, in a gimmick so horrible it makes every controversial series finale – the snow globe in St. Elsewhere, the cut to black on The Sopranos, what everyone thinks happened in the series finale of Lost – seem positively traditional. All of these finales merely messed with the audiences heads in the last minute; Riverdale did so with its entire last season.

Because as we all now know the final season began with the entire town being transported to the 1950s to save it from destruction. No one had any memory of a single event that had happened in the previous six seasons except Jughead. Then in the season premiere, Jughead learned from whatever spirit did this that the town’s goal was to create a better Riverdale, one in which all the horrible events that had happened before had not happened. Then Jughead’s memory was erased.

To repeat, the final season of Riverdale existed in an alternate universe where nothing that happened in the previous six seasons was remembered by anybody.  There have been some shows that have given a controversial ending but the final season has to be one of the biggest middle fingers that any series has ever given to its fanbase.  It is basically telling them: remember all the stories we spent six years telling you? None of them mattered and will have no effect on the final season or the end of the show. If I had stuck with the series through everything to this point and I had seen the season premiere, I would have thrown something through my television. Reinart and her colleagues at Riverdale want us not to laugh at them? How about doing the same kind of magic trick so no one who ever watched Riverdale has any memory of doing it? That’s the least they can do.

But I have to tell its not merely Riverdale’s existence that enrages me. It’s the overwhelming likelihood that this will be the last long running series that the CW ever produces. I have more than one reason to be angry at that, but I’ll start with a ripple effect that began when Riverdale premiered.

I’ve already made it clear that the CW was on shaky ground when Riverdale premiered in the winter of 2017. It certainly didn’t help the network’s credibility that nearly ever series that premiered in its aftermath either started out batshit insane or spun out of control by the time it was over. I’m thinking of Nancy Drew in particular. If the showrunners had merely decided to bring this iconic mystery series into the new millennium with a darker tone, it would have been difficult but I could have borne with it. What I found more loathsome was the decision very early in Season 1 to move away from mysteries and focus almost entirely on the supernatural. It was a reasoning that never made any sense to me, and that I don’t think could have been considered viable without Riverdale.

 I saw a similar level of spin out in so many of the other potential series that came along such as the controversial Tom Swift and some of the later seasons of Arrow.  Even series that were ostensibly original went in this direction. In the Dark when it started was an intriguing mystery series; when it came to its end four seasons later, it had turned every character into a criminal and basically turned Murphy, always prickly into a monster. I don’t know if the series was cancelled because of budgetary reasons or it came to a natural end, all I know is that was completely bonkers.

By that point I’d more or less run out of patience with the entire network: the fact that it was financially collapsing by the end of the 2021-2022 season almost seemed like a blessing.  Which is at the core of why Riverdale truly appalls me and why I am enraged at people like Reinhart who are upset at the mockery they have received for the show.

This attitude smacks of entitlement because it is. On no other network – probably not cable or streaming, certainly not any of major broadcast ones – would a series like Riverdale have been allowed to be created, much less last as long as it did.  It’s mere presence seems to have infected and poisoned almost every other series that came after it and quite a few that were airing concurrently. (The only series that walked away completely clean were Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin.) Am I saying that Riverdale existence helped destroy the CW has a producer of brilliant television and led to its financial ruin? Correlation does not equal causation. But one can draw a line between the kind of series that the CW would air before the existence of Riverdale and the kind that found an audience afterwards. We certainly got fewer series like All-American and more like Batwoman after it debuted.

And because Riverdale is going to be one of the last shows on before the lights go out on the CW as we knew it, it may very well linger in the memory of this generation than the ones before it. And I can’t tell you how much that appalls me. It’s like William Friedkin’s last major film being Killer Joe  or potential geniuses like Alan Parker’s career ended with The Life of David Gale.  I realize that most directors are not lucky enough to end their careers with masterpieces, but no one wants their last film to be Gigli or Ishtar.

And it’s hard not to look at a work like Riverdale as the television equivalent of a fiasco, something that might have once had the potential to be great or at least good but spun out of control and ended up being a disaster. The fact that this might be the final statement for the CW – not Supernatural or Jane or any of the half-dozen or so truly superb series that were a part of it – leaves  a bitter taste in my mouth that no milkshake will ever wash away.

I don’t know how the lives of the characters ended in the series finale of Riverdale last night, but there’s no ending that could be satisfactory for the viewers of this horrible mess of a series that started out dark and crazy, decided to keep increasing the weirdness function exponentially each season and then ended on a note that really made you wonder what anyone connected with the show was thinking.  If there was justice in the world of television, every one connected with the series going forward would be denied working in any other project because of this black-eye. But we know Hollywood doesn’t work that way. The least they could do is for the rest of their lives be force to wear a scarlet R on their clothing to mark them for the blemish that they put on Peak TV. That way the laughing could be done publicly instead of merely on the Internet.