Riverdale's DNA is taken straight from the Archie Comics, but this is not the version of Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead that your grandparents grew up with. As much Twin Peaks as it is a high school drama, the new CW TV show remixes Archie in a lot of significant ways.
But the show still needed to remain Archie at its core, and that was the fine line Archie Comics Chief Creative Officer and Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa needed to walk in Riverdale's execution. While it's a murder mystery that he promises will be resolved by the end of Season 1, "the challenge of the show -- or the fun of the show -- is to solve and service both the mystery and the relationships."
With that in mind, here is a breakdown of what Riverdale kept the same from its comic book source material, and what Aguirre-Sacasa felt needed to be switched up from the central characters in the Archie comics:
SAME: "The core of Archie to me, from the comics and on our show, is that he's a kid who wants to do the right thing but frequently messes up," said Aguirre-Sacasa. "With Archie, things kind of get worse before they get better. But he's basically a good guy who's there for his friends. That's sort of the core of Archie. When push comes to shove, he's there for his friends. He's there for his dad. He's there for his family. I think that when we first started talking about the -- oh! And, Archie loves music. But Archie is also a jock. He plays football, he does all that stuff. All that felt very arc typical."
DIFFERENT: "In the comic books he can be a little bit of an earnest character, so we did want to dirty him up a little bit and put him in slightly more compromised, more morally ambiguous situations, which we do from the get go. So that's kind of how we kind of tweaked Archie a little bit. I think his forbidden affair says everything about the kid. It's not just, weirdly that often times that that kind of dynamic is played for titillation and with Archie it really is played for the emotional fallout and it's something that we'll track throughout season one. It's sort of is a big secret that'll rear its ugly head and have big consequences as we go forward. ... It is ultimately the show is kind of a show that's about the loss of innocence and the journey to adulthood. That said, I think he does learn a lot about himself that's illuminated through this relationship. I think by the end of this season, he has figured out why that was bad and wrong and inappropriate and is ready for something that is more, that feels more right or that is more traditional for high school kids.".
SAME: "I'm obsessed with Betty. She's my favorite Archie character. I just really gravitate towards her," said Aguirre-Sacasa. "The idea was Betty was the girl next door, straight A student, knew how to fix a car, play sports, always held her hair back in a pony tail like Sandy from Grease but the idea was that she's perfect. The perfect daughter, the perfect sister, the perfect student, the perfect citizen of Riverdale."
DIFFERENT: "Taking that not as the truth but taking that as the outer layer, it was what are the demons that are pushing her to do these things and to excel. What void is she or need is she filling by doing these things, by being type A. And you know, it's true. We really do peel back Betty's layers like peeling back an onion. It keeps getting more complex and darker. And she's really in the crucible during the first season, especially during the first half of the season. It's sort of like every episode we're like, we're going to tell a fun story with Betty and it's like, 'Oh, Betty is closer to the looney bin than ever.'"
SAME: "If there was one character we did kind of want kind of to go against, it was Veronica. In the comic book, as she says very famously in a panel, 'I'm rich, beautiful and ruthless.' And Veronica is those things. She's not rich, but she sort of still is society and all that stuff," said Aguirre-Sacasa. "She is a little bit ruthless, but I think the idea was that the idea of the ice queen, the idea of the queen B, the idea of the mean girl, Veronica was sort of rejecting that. That was her core struggle for the first season is to, I used to be this thing, 'Now I want to be something more well-rounded, more evolved, deeper, and more unexpected.' That's sort of her core. We are honoring her core in that her basic struggle is to rebel against it."
DIFFERENT: "The idea of putting her under this Madoff-like scandal was a very early idea. I loved Blue Jasmine and I wondered what it would be like if it ever happened to The Lodges. One thing no one was interested in was that we didn't want the show to be about a bunch of bitchy sarcastic girls. And in fact, even in the development, you know, at one point, it was like, we think we need this show to be a little bit edgier and I kind of did a pass where everyone was a little bit bitchier and a little bit cutting, and the show kind of rejected it. It was like, eh, not really interested in that; interested in the friendships."
SAME: "One thing that's fun about Riverdale is that we know from the comic books that Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead are all in Archie's band and they're all friends. They're all best friends. One thing that's fun to do with this, especially in the first season, is to treat it kind of like the superhero shows that this is the origin," said Aguirre-Sacasa. "This is them before they are that tight knit musical group The Archies. And nowhere is that better exemplified better than Jughead. The world was huge and it felt like we did want some character to be our way into it. Jughead kind of was the weird worldly philosopher, the character who kind of even in the comic books, kind of knew what was going on in a deeper way than the kids were. It's almost like he, I don't know if you've seen the show Westworld, it's sort of like the Ed Harris character always says there's a deeper game happening. I always think that's Jughead. There's a deeper game going here."
DIFFERENT: "He's angsty for sure. That's a trope, that's an archetype that I like. He's much more angsty than the Jughead in the comic books. The Jughead in the comic books, he's more comic relief and I think Jughead is integrated more into the world of our characters as the season goes on. He starts working with Betty on the newspaper in episode 3. In episode 4, we learn a lot about Jughead in that episode. I think his relationships with Archie and Betty especially do deepen as we go in and he becomes a little bit of an insider. I think kind of the big tension with Jughead is that the's not like the others. He's not as well adjusted as the others, though who's -- I don't know if anyone is well adjusted at this point. We really do, I think, harness the fact that Jughead is a bit of an iconoclast and is a little bit of an outlier. That's how he is and that's how he wants to be."
Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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