Trivia / Riverdale

• Billing Displacement: Josie in Season 1, who was credited as a regular but barely appeared/had a plot, whereas Kevin and Valerie were guests with a much bigger plot.
• California Doubling: The show is shot in British Columbia, Canada.
• Channel Hop: The show was originally in development under Fox in 2014 before Fox decided not to pick up the show, resulting in The CW picking up the show a year later.
• The Cast Showoff: A good chunk of the cast consists of great vocalists, with KJ Apa (Archie), Camila Mendes (Veronica), Lili Reinhart (Betty), Ashleigh Murray (Josie), Casey Cott (Kevin), Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl), Hayley Law (Valerie), and Asha Bromfield (Melody) all getting chances to sing to this point.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Vanessa Morgan originally auditioned for Josie and made enough of an impression despite not getting the role to be cast as Toni in Season 2.
• The Character Died with Him: The fourth season premiere focuses on the death of Fred Andrews months after Luke Perry suddenly passed away from a stroke.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Luke Perry wasn't happy with Fred being an Extreme Doormat and letting Archie treat him like shit throughout Season 2.
  • Vanessa Morgan accused the crew of having a problem with showing homosexual content beyond the occasional token kiss after she had numerous scenes cut.
  • Skeet Ulrich announced in late May 2020 that he was leaving the show, and when asked about the matter, the actor replied that he "got bored creatively."
  • Lili Reinhart hated the black wig Betty wore and its accompanying 'Dark Betty' storyline sexualising/fetishising Betty's mental health issues. She refused to wear it from mid-Season 2 onwards.
• Creator's Favorite: Betty Cooper and Lili Reinhart. Towards the end of the series, Aguirre-Sacasa stated the character was his muse, and it's evident as, after Season 1, Betty was the character with the most screen time, and the series finale is centered on her, despite the show being marketed with an ostensible ensemble cast.
• The Danza: Raul Castillo as songwriter Oscar Castillo.
• Dawson Casting: The show is infamous for trying to have 20-somethings pass as teenagers.
  • Most obvious cases being Josie (Ashleigh Murray, 29), Reggie (Ross Butler, 26), Chuck (Jordan Calloway, 26), and Jughead (Cole Sprouse, 24).
  • Special mention to Cole because people love to point out that he's already played a high schooler 10 years prior to the show existing. Despite this, he still looks the most convincing, with the fact that audiences already knew what he really looked like as a teenager being the main thing that dispels the belief.
  • This trope reaches its apex in Season 5 when the (very noticeably) 34-year-old Zane Holtz portrays his Katy Keene character K.O. Kelly as a teenager.
  • Reaches an apex beyond an apex when all the characters are returned to high school in Season 7, despite the cast having aged seven years since the show started production.
• Died During Production: Luke Perry passed away after a stroke partway through Season 3. Molly Ringwald was brought back to fill his intended role for the three remaining episodes he couldn’t film, with Fred vaguely just being said to be “away”. At the same time, Archie’s mother looks after him, giving them time to figure out how to deal with his continued absence. The Season 4 premiere was made entirely into a tribute to Perry as Fred makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save someone else from a speeding car, resulting in the whole town giving a lavish celebration of his life, heroes and villains alike paying respect.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • KJ Apa has dark brown hair and dyed it red for his role as Archie.
  • Lili Reinhart has light brown hair, and has it dyed blonde.
  • Mädchen Amick has brown hair and has it dyed blonde for Alice.
  • Camila Mendes, while a natural brunette with dark brown hair, has her hair dyed black for the show.
  • Another brunette with dark brown hair, Marisol Nichols, also has her hair dyed black.
  • Similarly, the blond Cole Sprouse dyes his hair black as Jughead.
  • Trevor Stines also has light brown hair and has it dyed red.
  • Nathalie Boltt has brown hair and has it dyed red.
• Executive Meddling: The Betty/Jughead romance was created to make Archie jealous and force him to realise his feelings for Betty, leading to Archie/Betty becoming the Official Couple in Season 2. However, the publicity garnered by the real life romance between the Betty/Jughead actors saw the network/studio decide to capitalise on that to promote the show. It failed spectacularly, as the show's audience dwindled drastically from mid-Season 2 onwards, the point at which Archie/Betty would have gotten together.
  • Furthering this strategy, Betty/Jughead from seasons 2-4 saw a drastic gain of almost all of the screen time and storylines, with little to no room for the other characters.
• Fake American:
  • New Zealand's KJ Apa as Archie Andrews.
  • And from Canada - Lochlyn Munro (Betty's father), Martin Cummins (Kevin's father), Barclay Hope (Cheryl's father), Tiera Skovbye as Polly Cooper, Rob Raco as Joaquin, and others.
  • Nathalie Boltt, who plays Penelope Blossom, is from South Africa.
• Fake Mixed Race: Toni is revealed to be descended from the Native American tribe who were the inspiration for the Serpents, with full-blooded Oneida Graham Greene playing her grandfather. Vanessa Morgan is of Tanzanian and Scottish descent.
• Follow the Leader: Like One Tree Hill before it, the show has a Time Skip following the character's graduation from high school.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: It was initially conceived as a film in vein of the John Hughes high school films of the Eighties before being expanded and reworked into a TV show. This is even potentially lampshaded by Cheryl when she addresses Archie, Betty, Jughead, Veronica, and Kevin:
  " Sorry to interrupt, Sad Breakfast Club."
• The Other Darrin: Dilton is played by Daniel Yang in the pilot but is replaced with Major Curda afterwards. And with Ross Butler's commitment to 13 Reasons Why, Charles Melton replaced him as Reggie for Season 2.
• Playing Their Own Twin: Barclay Hope, who played Clifford Blossom in the first season, plays his Strong Family Resemblance brother Claudius in Season 2.
• Promoted Fan Boy: Cole Sprouse is a big fan of the comics, to the point that he convinced the producers to make Hot Dog a sheepdog like he is in the original material.
• Real-Life Relative: Mark Consuelos's son Michael played a young Hiram Lodge in the fifth season episode "Citizen Lodge".
• Recursive Adaptation:
  • In Chapter 2, Josie and the Pussycats sing "Candy Girl (Sugar Sugar)" by Inner Circle ft. Flo Rida, which samples the song "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies, is based on the band from the original Archie comics.
  • The show also had its own tie-in comics launched in April 2017 before their cancellation in 2018 after issue 12.
• Recycled Script: After Season 1, every episode goes like this: Betty/Jughead investigate something; Archie starts a new sport/vigilante group where he has to fight someone (often times Hiram); Veronica runs in circles over whether she is for/against her criminal father, her existence revolving around him; and sometimes Cheryl pops up to do something crazy that ruins something. Nobody ever learns anything or develops. Lather, rinse, repeat. Seasons 5-6, while still consumed with random plot, got back to developing the characters - letting them make choices, learn and grow. Season 7 was strictly random plot, and the characters did not retain their memories, leaving all hitherto development nullified.
• Romance on the Set:
  • Lili Reinhart and Cole Sprouse—who play Betty and Jughead, the longest-lasting Official Couple of the show—dated in real life until August 2020, when Sprouse confirmed they broke up.
  • Camila Mendes (Veronica) dated Charles Melton (Reggie) from October 2018 to December 2019.
  • The most infamous example involves Skeet Ulrich dating Lucy Hale, despite him being 20 years her senior.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • There are subtle similarities between Jughead's and F.P.'s features that truly make them look like father and son (their eyes and jaws, in particular, are similar).
  • This is nothing compared to Betty and Polly and their younger counterparts in the Season 1 flashback, who look identical to the girls when they're in high school.
  • Cheryl Blossom looks a lot like her mother as well.
  • Madelaine Petsch and Trevor Stines very convincingly play twins.^note  Being opposite-sex, Cheryl and Jason aren't identical twins, but they could pass as such.
  • The Cooper family might be the most on-point casting on television. Interestingly, Betty looks more like Alice, and Polly looks more like Hal.^note  Although Polly's face shape is more square-like, Alice's and Betty's face shape is more like Hal's. Chic looks a lot like The Cooper family as well, despite turning out to not be related to them after all.
  • This is exploited in season 3's The Midnight Club, where the main cast plays younger versions of their parents, with KJ Apa managing to look spot-on as a young Luke Perry.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The reason Archie has a broken hand in the Season 1 finale and throughout Season 2 is because KJ Apa really did break his hand while filming the scene where Archie punched his hand through the top of an icy lake. To explain why he was wearing a cast, the crew wrote it so that Archie broke his hand in-universe for the same reason.
• Similarly Named Works: There was a 1997 CBC series called Riverdale.
• Star-Making Role: For pretty much the entire teenage cast, bar Cole Sprouse who was already well-known for his child roles.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: The Grand Finale episode ends with everyone dead in 2023 (having been changed via Time Travel to have been born in the 1930s), though they're shown enjoying milkshakes at Pop's in what's implied to be a "perpetual high school" afterlife..
• Troubled Production:
  • Season 2 got some bad buzz before it even started when KJ Apa fell asleep while driving home from filming and crashed into a pole, causing some controversy over the long hours the younger actors were being put through, including an anonymous source outright saying, "Someone is going to die." Luckily things didn't get that far, but the season still suffered the loss of several cast members, which forced some very contrived writing decisions. Most damagingly, they lost the actor for the character planned to be revealed as The Dragon in the season finale, and rather than alter their plans; we were treated to a quite amusingly pathetic attempt to wrap the story up without him ever appearing onscreen, including news of his death in a massive shootout. Luckily, they negotiated his return in a single episode the following season to give the story proper closure.
  • Production on the fourth season came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, leaving the final three episodes unfilmed; the unfilmed episodes would ultimately be repurposed as the opening episodes of Season 5.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In a dark twist, Kevin's father was an abusive homophobe in the original pilot script. In the actual show, he's supportive of his son's sexual orientation, much like in the comics.
  • Jughead was initially supposed to be deaf in the original pilot script and needed to use a hearing aid. However, this does not seem to be the case in the show.
  • In the original pilot script, Veronica had a mean case of Adaptational Villainy on par with Afterlife with Archie, and she mainly liked Archie for his looks. In the final product, she was toned down to be more like her Spoiled Sweet main-comics incarnation.
  • The crew had several possible culprits in mind for Jason's killer. Besides the canonical Clifford, it also could have been FP (whose motivation was reworked into the story he gives the cops in his false confession), Hiram, or Hal, or even all of them together (you might notice a pattern here, given the show's focus on fathers and children).
    • A similar strategy was taken during Season 2 by the writers regarding the identity of the Black Hood, with several Red Herrings being written into the show to keep it ambiguous and avoid fans figuring it out ahead of The Reveal.
  • In the original pilot script, Polly lived with her parents, and she hated Jason as much as they did.
  • The original plan for the Season 1 finale's cliffhanger was that Sabrina Spellman would arrive in Riverdale. In Season 2, she would have been an antagonist, and the show would change to horror on account of her supernatural powers.
  • The producers considered also giving Toni and Fangs powers in Season 6 like Tabitha, Jughead, Archie, Betty, Cheryl and Veronica, but opted to focus their storylines on their son, Anthony, instead. Toni would’ve had ice powers; Fangs, wind powers.
• Word of Saint Paul:
  • In a 2022 Paleyfest interview, KJ Apa confirms that Archie and Betty were each other's long lost loves that finally got their chance in Season 6.
  • Cole Sprouse has shown a lot of interest in interviews about exploring Jughead's asexuality, and has said that in terms of possible romantic relations for the character that Jughead will likely be the pursued rather than the pursuer. This ended up Jossed, with Jughead becoming an item with Betty with little relationship drama between them.
  • In various interviews during and after Season One, both Camila Mendes (Veronica) and Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl) have expressed interest in exploring their characters' sexuality. Cheryl would eventually come as a lesbian in Season Two, having been heavily closeted before.
• Written-In Infirmity: K.J. Apa really did break his hand filming the scene of Archie punching through the ice to save Cheryl, which was very easy to work in.

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