Dispatches from the Riverdale Register: "Dirty Dancing"
"You know television makes my skin crawl."
Welcome back, Riverdale-heads. Let’s talk a little about television.
I have watched every other season of Riverdale on Netflix, where I binged the episodes. Every year I would dutifully avoid spoilers from those watching live on The CW, and would take in the season several months later. Riverdale first premiered as a mid-season replacement on The CW. With only 13 episodes, Season One became a huge hit on Netflix, building hype for Season Two. I remember - I was there!
In many ways, Riverdale is meant to be binged. Each season is usually structured around a mystery, and us greedy consumers can shove all the episodes in our mouth at once so that the mystery doesn’t have to remain unsolved week to week to week. I also think that bingeing can help you stay immersed in the world of Riverdale. The more Riverdale I consume in a 24 hour period, the less likely I am to question a particular storyline, or puzzle over why the town of Riverdale changes from a small town barely on the map to the central location of a drug empire.
So it’s been interesting watching Season 7 as my first experience seeing Riverdale as it’s technically meant to be seen - week to week. I’ve read complaints from viewers that this season feels slow, and like nothing is happening. While I don’t necessarily agree, as I continue to write this column I do realize that I am still adjusting to thinking about Riverdale as a weekly show rather than chunks of time I spend on my couch with several months in between. It’s weird, because I used to do this all the time, with shows like Veronica Mars and Lost. It’s perhaps a lost art.
Television comes up in this episode in two ways. One, Betty is forced to dance on her parents’ show Riverdale Grandstand, which I mentioned last week as a Riverdale off-brand American Bandstand. Two, Veronica starts working at old movie palace The Babylonium and makes clear her cinephile’s disdain for the new medium of television. I want to again plug cinema cauldron’s piece about Riverdale, which talks extensively about the history of television and film’s relationship with one another, and film’s influence on Riverdale.
The use of Riverdale Grandstand is interesting here. Early on in the episode, Betty says, “Only nerds and squares are on Dad’s dance show.” I first learned about American Bandstand when I watched the criminally underrated period drama American Dreams, which aired on NBC from 2002 to 2005. Set in 1963-1966, American Dreams follows Meg Pryor (Brittany Snow, in one of her first big roles), a good girl from an Irish Catholic family whose dream is to dance on American Bandstand. In the show, Bandstand is framed as cool and even edgy, compared to Meg’s strict Catholic upbringing. But what host Dick Clark was doing with Bandstand was making rock n roll music and youth culture palatable for older generations:
In order to help establish a clean-cut image for the show, guys were required to wear ties with suit jackets or sweaters, while girls dressed in “good taste,” for example a high-cut blouse with a dress or skirt. Clark felt such conventions helped boost the perception of rock-and-roll, which in the 1950s was a controversial genre often disliked by older generations. (link here)
This whitewashed aspect is clearer in the satirical treatment of John Waters’ film-turned-musical Hairspray. The Corny Collins Show in Hairspray is modeled after The Buddy Deane Show, Baltimore’s real-life local dance show that had a rivalry with the Philadelphia-based American Bandstand. Corny Collins’ show is strictly segregated, and the dancing is lame compared to the moves that the black teens show protagonist Tracy Turnblad. These “cool” kids on Collins’ show? They’re called the “Nicest Kids in Town”1. Very edgy.
Having Betty’s parents Hal and Alice host a show that represents Nice, Clean-Cut, White American values (with a veneer of cool, to get the teens hooked) is a cool concept that fits in with Hal and Alice being repressive parents who nevertheless look better than say, the more overtly religious Muggs parents (rest in peace?). At the same time, I think there was something missing in this storyline. I loved how it touched on the double standard sexual politics with straight men and women. Betty is put on the show to rehab her new reputation as a fast girl, but when a boy on the show sexually harasses her and Betty rebuffs him, she gets punished for not letting him grab her ass in peace. But I don’t know how I feel about Betty’s “protest” of flashing her underwear on live television.
In a scene before this happens, Betty and Archie are talking about how all the adults in their lives are hypocrites trying to control their lives, and Archie points out that making them dance on Riverdale Grandstand is a distraction from real problems - rare moment of insight from ol’ Arch! You can see the wheel turning in Betty’s mind, and it seems like maybe she’s concocted an interesting sabotage with Archie like she does with Toni, Cheryl and Tabitha in the first episode this season. We know Riverdale is integrated so it can’t be that version of Hairspray, but I was thinking she and Archie were somehow gonna hold up signs about the hypocrisy of Riverdale while doing a silly dance or something.
I can sort of see what they were going for vis-a-vis the whitewashed rock n roll of Riverdale Grandstand—Betty interrupts dancers doing The Twirl by showing them what happens when you really twirl your skirt, which speaks to the way these kids were dancing in a wholesome manner over lyrics that sometimes had suggestive double meanings. In-universe, Betty does this because she wants to embarrass her parents (and thus Riverdale), which tracks…but I don’t know, I feel like there was another way to get here.
We’ll come back to Betty. I don’t have too much to say about Veronica’s plot that I won’t get to in the Stray Observations section, but I simply must talk about Veronica’s meta-quest to bring us back to movie theaters…by which I mean she creates the Nicole Kidman AMC commercial in 1955 Riverdale.
This is quintessentially Riverdale. The show that brought you “It’s not queer-baiting, it’s saving the world”, the show that loves other movies more than it loves other television, needed to pay tribute this outstanding meme. Again, it’s not as out of place as it sounds—television’s arrival drastically changed the movie business, which needed to compete with a free at-home experience. Sound familiar? Also, before Veronica even mentioned doing a commercial for the Babylonium, I wrote in my notes: “I wanna see Veronica do the Nicole Kidman ad!” Call me Maddie-damus.
Stray observations
Alice Cooper and Penelope Blossom are good friends in this timeline, which is an unholy alliance. I wish they still hated each other!
UNCLE FRANK IS ICKY.
I was so happy to finally see a Kevin and Tom Keller scene…and then I was so sad.
Apparently Ethel and Dilton used to dance together on Riverdale Grandstand, aww.
Obviously the whole Kevin plotline was awful and stressful. Archie was kind of up and down through the whole thing, but in the end this precious himbo loves his friend Kevin for who he is, and I think that’s sweet. And maybe Archie’s a little bi, and Archie’s Weird Fantasy will finally come to life!
Jughead’s kind of on my nerves, but Brad Raybury being his new father figure was very touching…oh no.
Twyla Twyst, who I barely remembered from Season 6, is back. She was a leader of the Ghoulies, and is now a sex worker who specializes in deflowering underage boys. Well then!
I like Clay getting character development outside of being Kevin’s boyfriend. Also, Clay, Veronica and the manager could definitely be in a production of Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick.
The Lodges are back to shady real estate dealings, and Veronica’s back to buying property out from under her parent’s noses.
Archie’s dancing is a highlight of this season.
Super Duck is a real title from Archie Comics
Veronica composing a telegram to her parents: “Send my best to Uncle Orson, stop.”
Old time slang word of the week: The big one was Frosted, which means angry or annoyed. I definitely don’t wanna see Alice Cooper frosted.
Off-brand product name: This was a weird one. Veronica talks about getting her Edward Hopper painting appraised at Crestby’s, which I guess is off-grand Sotheby’s. It has none of the elegant charm of the usual off-brand Riverdale name.
Real life product name: Besides Hopper, the real black director Oscar Micheaux is mentioned.
Before I let you go, let’s get back to Betty. Her antics on Riverdale Grandstand earn her a visit with our favorite school psychiatrist Dr. Werthers. I love watching Betty Cooper go toe to toe with authority figures who aren’t Alice Cooper, so this got me excited. Dr. Werthers has also been targeting Jughead, so I also got excited, thinking that in this universe maybe Betty and Jughead will finally team up because they are mutually fighting Dr. Werthers and the White Man Cabal of Riverdale. But no sooner had I thought this than Jughead narrated that he was happy that Werthers attention shifted off of him to Betty. Fuck you, Jughead! You stopped trying to save Ethel, and now you’re gonna let this fascist fuck someone else over even though you know what he’s capable of? The old Jughead would never!
…and then a very strange Milkman shows up at Brad Raybury’s door. I am sad for Jughead…but then I get my hopes up for a Betty/Jughead team up once again.
And then Lili Reinhart tweets this in the midst of filming the final season of Riverdale:
…I don’t think we’re getting that Betty and jughead team-up.
“Nice white kids who like to lead the way…” the song goes (emphasis mine)