Riverdale premiered on The CW on January 26, 2017, and ran for seven seasons and 137 episodes before ending on August 23, 2023. The show adapted the Archie Comics characters for television, with Archie Comics chief creative officer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa leading the adaptation. Warner Bros. Television and CBS Studios produced it with Berlanti Productions and Archie Comics.
The hook was simple. A teenager is murdered in Riverdale, and a group of teenagers try to unravel the evils lurking within the town. What aired was never simple.
Trailer, via Still Watching Netflix.
From a Warner Bros. Feature to The CW
Riverdale started life as a feature film for Warner Bros. Pictures. It was then re-imagined as a television series for Fox. Development moved to The CW in 2015, where the network ordered a pilot. Filming took place in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The production history matters less than the result. The show built an ensemble from the Archie Comics characters. KJ Apa played Archie Andrews. Lili Reinhart played Betty Cooper. Camila Mendes played Veronica Lodge. Cole Sprouse played Jughead Jones, the series’ narrator.
That narrator choice is the show’s smartest structural move. Jughead stands outside the action and frames every new horror the town produces.
KJ Apa, Lili Reinhart and the Core Four
Apa’s Archie is a former high school football player with a passion for music. After graduating, he fought as an Army sergeant and became a JROTC instructor at his old high school. He is childhood best friends with his next door neighbor, Betty Cooper, and best friends with Jughead Jones. He dated Veronica Lodge in high school before they broke up, then began a relationship with Betty and proposed to her in the season six finale. He also becomes invulnerable after surviving a bomb explosion.
Reinhart’s Betty is smart, best friends with Archie, and carries a longtime crush on him. She becomes friends with Veronica when Veronica moves to town. In high school she dates Jughead, with whom she runs the school paper, and breaks up with him before going away to college. She becomes an FBI agent and operates from Riverdale. She gradually develops a relationship with Archie and becomes engaged to him in the season six finale.
Mendes plays Veronica, a former “it girl” of Manhattan who moves to Riverdale at the start of the series. She hopes to become a better person after reflecting on the turmoil in her life after her father is convicted and sent to prison. She is ambitious and wants to succeed, but also works to be humble.
The Casting That Built Riverdale
The casting process ran through 2016 and produced the ensemble that carried the show.
- Lili Reinhart and Cole Sprouse were cast as Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones on February 9, 2016.
- KJ Apa was cast as Archie Andrews on February 24, 2016, after a four-month worldwide talent search.
- Ashleigh Murray was cast as Josie McCoy, lead singer of Josie and the Pussycats, the same day.
- Luke Perry and Madelaine Petsch joined as Fred Andrews and Cheryl Blossom.
- Camila Mendes was cast as Veronica Lodge two days later, marking her first acting role in a television show.
- Marisol Nichols and Mädchen Amick joined in March 2016 as Hermione Lodge and Alice Cooper.
- Casey Cott was the last actor to join the pilot, as Kevin Keller, the first openly gay character in Archie Comics history.
Reinhart almost did not land the role. Her video-based audition did not convince, but after moving to LA and attending an in-person casting, she was chosen to play Betty Cooper. Apa was one of the last to audition and landed the role just days later.
Mark Consuelos, Charles Melton and the Later Additions
The cast kept growing after the pilot. In April 2017, Mark Consuelos signed on for the second season to play Veronica’s father, Hiram Lodge. Consuelos already held a role on Pitch, and that job took priority. Pitch was cancelled on May 1, 2017, which freed him for Riverdale.
The next month, Charles Melton was cast to take over the role of Reggie from Ross Butler in season two, due to Butler’s status as a series regular on 13 Reasons Why. Casey Cott, who played Kevin Keller, was promoted to a series regular. In July 2017, True Blood star Brit Morgan was cast in the recurring role of Penny Peabody, an attorney.
That churn is normal for a long-running network show, but it also shows how much Riverdale kept rebuilding itself. Characters arrived, left, and came back. The show treated its own cast like a rotating puzzle.
Seven Seasons and the 1950s Detour
Riverdale ran for seven seasons. The last aired on August 23, 2023. The later seasons drew criticism for the writing, direction, lack of coherent storylines, and a perceived decline in quality.
The season seven detour into the 1950s is the clearest example of the show’s late instincts. In that setting, Archie discovers a passion for poetry and settles down in Modesto as a construction worker and amateur writer, where he meets a girl and starts a family with her. When he dies, he is buried in Riverdale next to his father. Betty, after exploring her sexuality and finding her independence, settles in New York, where she runs her own Women’s magazine and adopts her daughter, Carla.
Those endings are strange, specific, and oddly moving. They are also a long way from where the show started. The 1950s season ends Archie’s story in Modesto and Betty’s in New York, with Archie buried back in Riverdale beside his father.
The Schedule That Made Riverdale
The show’s run is easy to lay out.
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Series premiere | January 26, 2017 |
| Betty and Jughead casting | February 9, 2016 |
| Archie casting | February 24, 2016 |
| Veronica casting | February 26, 2016 |
| Hiram Lodge casting | April 2017 |
| Series finale | August 23, 2023 |
Seven seasons, 137 episodes, and a first air date in January 2017. That is the shape of it.
What Riverdale Got Right and What It Lost
Riverdale’s best idea was its first one. Take the Archie Comics gang, put a murder underneath them, and let the town rot from the inside. The show’s synopsis promises the surreality of small-town life and the darkness and weirdness bubbling beneath Riverdale’s wholesome facade. For a while, it delivered exactly that.
The cast is the reason it lasted. Apa, Reinhart, Mendes, and Sprouse gave the show four distinct centers, and the supporting players — Petsch as Cheryl Blossom, Cott as Kevin Keller, Drew Ray Tanner as Fangs Fogarty, Vanessa Morgan as Toni Topaz, Amick as Alice Cooper — filled out a town that felt populated rather than staged.
The problem is that Riverdale never knew when to stop escalating. The later seasons were criticized for their writing, direction, and lack of coherent storylines, and that criticism is fair. The show kept adding bigger swings: Archie becomes invulnerable after surviving a bomb explosion, a real plot point rather than a joke. That is the moment the show stopped being about a town and started being about whatever the writers could think of next.
The 1950s season is the show at its most confident and its most lost. It is a bold swing, and it produces genuinely strange, memorable endings for Archie and Betty. It is also a season that abandons almost everything the first seasons built.
The published critical score sits at 6.8 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 68 out of 100. That feels right. Riverdale is not a great show, but it is a singular one. It ran seven seasons on the strength of its cast and its willingness to go somewhere no other teen drama would. The early seasons earn the score. The later ones drag it down to exactly where it landed.
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