I still remember when we saw the first season of Riverdale, and we all thought it was going to be just another mystery show for teenagers…

It seems to be a rather common occurrence among TV shows targeted towards a teenage audience, and specifically with the CW shows. Pretty Little Liars went through the same thing, but without the characters getting superpowers and opening portals to other dimensions. No, in the PLL case, it was mostly just recycled plots, never-ending conflicts, ridiculous breakups and couples, and the whole ‘evil twin’ thing that seemed taken out of a telenovela. 

Riverdale lost its mind in a much more exaggerated way. The first two, and I’ll even stretch to say, three seasons were normal. Or as normal as you could expect from a CW show where all the adults seemed to live in a different reality, and the teenagers basically controlled the town and were better investigators than the few professional detectives that were in town. But afterwards, it just became short of a fever dream

I swear, I’ve tried many times to pinpoint the exact season or moment when everything started going south, but I’m having a hard time at it. Maybe it was when they introduced the musical episodes. I confess, as a theater kid at heart that I am, I loved those episodes, and I found them hilarious, but I’ll admit that they were completely out of context. 

It could be when Veronica opened her own nightclub while being underage. Or when the crossover with Sabrina actually happened. Or the season that started with the alternate universe. I could go on for hours, but you all get the point by now. There were so many unhinged plotlines that we don’t understand how any of them got away with, basically everything that they did. Don’t even get me started on Cheryl getting witchy superpowers and stopping a comet from destroying the Earth. Seriously, who thought of that? And did nobody tell the writers that what they were doing was next to sheer insanity? Who gave the green light to those scripts? These are questions that will probably never be answered. 

Even so, we can still rewatch the first few seasons and pretend like the rest never happened. And we can still have a good laugh at all the memes!