“Riverdale” is the CW’s modern reimagining of the Archie comic franchise, and it is nothing short of a spectacle. Throughout its five seasons, the show targeted at teens has indelicately stumbled its way through a staggering number of plotlines involving serial killers, gangs, cults, gay conversion camps, incest, mobs, student-teacher “romances” and much, much more.
Despite premiering its first season to positive critical review, the show has not only descended in popularity, but it has become decidedly infamous for its nonsensical dialogue and plot. By now, it has become a laughing stock, and a quick Google search of “Riverdale cringe” will prove it. But those who see these out-of-context clips and think the show is bad are not in on the joke: “Riverdale” is peak camp.
To some, it may be blasphemous to consider a CW Network TV show targeted at teenagers as camp. Many would say that “Riverdale” isn’t camp at all, that it just failed to achieve its highly aspirational goal of revealing the dark underbelly of the wholesome American culture that the original Archie comics portrayed.
While I am no expert on camp, “Riverdale” does demonstrate some of the key aspects of camp as described in Susan Sontag’s near-definitive essay on the topic, “Notes on Camp.” When viewed this way, “Riverdale” is no longer seen as a failure, but as successful in its goal to relish in its own excesses and to have fun along the way.
Over the course of its five seasons, it has become the object of ridicule among the very audience it targets. Clips from the show demonstrating its cringe-inducing dialogue (see: Jughead’s “I’m a weirdo” speech or Archie’s remark about “the epic highs and lows of high school football”) have gone viral, inspiring endless tweets and TikToks bashing the show’s writing.
Now, it cannot be argued that these scenes are “good” in the sense that they challenge us or reflect on the human condition in the way that high art does, but this isn’t the goal of camp. “The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious,” Sontag wrote. “Camp is playful, anti-serious.” The scenes are exceedingly effective in what they were written to do: to bask in the absurdity of a world in which teenagers that look like full-grown adults can simultaneously be worried about unmasking the local prolific serial killer and taking their SATs.
Camp is also committed to lush and unusual aesthetics. “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement,” Sontag wrote. “Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art and for life a different — or supplementary — set of standards.”
Almost no other teen television show has focused so highly on aesthetics (with the exception of “Twin Peaks,” the David Lynch show that undoubtedly highly influenced “Riverdale”), a key feature of camp. If “Riverdale” excels in any way to a viewer who does not appreciate the conventions of teen television, it is in its visuals. Through costuming, set design and cinematography, “Riverdale” manages to achieve a modern, but preternatural look: a landscape in which time itself is ambiguous. In “Riverdale,” the cars, restaurants, uniforms and gangs are straight out of the ‘50s, while the neon lighting is decidedly ‘80s and the plotlines are modern but influenced by the neo-noir film genre. This devotion to aesthetics is a key element of camp.
This argument is not to say because “Riverdale” is camp, “Riverdale” is good. But I do hope to highlight the ways in which the show’s more absurd traits can be evaluated under an alternate framework. “Riverdale’s” outrageous reflection of American life is not only deliciously fun, but feels liberating in the era in which all television attempts to be “prestige TV.” “Riverdale” haters can have their gritty, slow-burning dramas, but I will sit down every week to watch a colorful catastrophe of the hottest people I’ve ever seen saying the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, and I will love it every single time.
