It’s been a minute since we’ve talked, babes! How the hell have ya been? Sorry to pull a move like every single man I’ve ever dated and cease all communication once the weather gets warm, but ya girl has been busy. Busy drowning in deadlines and busy avoiding those deadlines by re-watching all four seasons of Nikita. Both are acceptable excuses for ghosting on her own newsletter.
When I sat down to write this week’s newsletter I thought about doing something very original and painting my regular THTW in a red, white, and blue theme. My calendar alerted me that the July 4th was coming up by sending me a “memory” from 11 years ago wherein I’m taking a beer bong to the face on some unlucky sand dune, and well, I’ve never been one to miss an opportunity to grab at the low-hanging fruit. Or in this case, the low-hanging hot dogs.
But I forgot that this holiday is not about choking on Bud Light or star-spangled bikinis. What is at the core of this holiday is independence. So instead I’m going to use this week’s newsletter to salute our unsung heroes, the men and women who performed on the front lines, who put aside their wants and needs for the greater good. I’m of course talking about the cast of Riverdale.
For those of you who didn’t know, I used to write weekly recaps for Riverdale. It was an act that has deeply offended my English degree ever since I wrote the words “and then Cheryl waterboarded her mother with maple syrup” and got paid pennies on the dollar to do it. As a former Riverdale-beat person it saddens me to say that this week the show finally met it’s end. After seven long seasons Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s reign of terror is over.
Confession: I stopped watching Riverdale sometime during the third season. The last plot points I recall are Chad Michael Murray being introduced as a cult leader (lol), a mystical Gargoyle King getting the town hooked on playing D&D and murdering each other, incest twins Dagwood and Juniper levitating for some reason, and a high school senior opening up her own bar in the basement of a diner. These are not so much coherent plotlines as the highs and lows in brain chemistry while taking a high dosage of Adderall. By the end of season three the recap had been axed and so had my patience. There was only so much this one adult could defend about a show whose target audience is 14-year-old girls in training bras.
But swiping through the cast’s photo dumps of their last days on set I’m reminded that beneath the incest plotlines, the soft-core tickle porn, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s insistence that KJ Apa not do a lick of acting unless his shirt was already off, Riverdale actually cultivated some real talent.
When Do Revenge debuted last fall I was shocked that Camilla Mendes (who plays Veronica Lodge) was more than just two perfectly groomed eyebrows. The girl can act. Lili Reinhart (Betty Cooper) published a book of poems in 2020. I can’t comment on the content of the collection as poetry mostly eludes me as an artform, but I can appreciate that she did something other than another celebrity memoir. Cole Sprouse (Jughead Jones) donned a leather jacket and made me feel things that I have no business feeling about a Sprouse twin.
My point is the cast was actually quite talented and I’m excited for them to be set free from Roberto’s sinister clutches. That cast deserves a Purple Heart for their valor. The sheer volume of maple syrup puns written into each week’s script would have sent any other young actor running as fast and as far away from Vancouver’s city limits as they could get. But this cast stuck it out. They spent seven years of their lives, practically their entire 20s, devoted to a show that made them read lines like “Papa Poutine’s son Small Fry is in town” with a straight face.
As Cami Mendes said in her Instagram caption: “farewell Riverdale… we survived.”
Humble Brags & Things I Wrote
My second deep dive Hot Topic is live and it’s a gooood one. Hot Topics are longer explorations of my favorite topics, musings on nostalgia, and analyses of iconic pop culture moments. Hot Topic #2 was all about the Olsen twins and the Gemini curse that drives them. You don’t want to miss it!!!