Boob(s On Your) Tube: Jingle Your Jangle, It’s Time to Talk About “Riverdale”

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

29 Comments

  1. I’ve watched all of Godless and must give to a recommendation. Merritt Weaver is awesome in it.She plays a gun-totting butch in the Wild West which is as good as it sounds. Their is romance and the show is certfitied in not burying it’s gays. Michelle Dockery is also in it being cool as f**ck. And there’s also alot of guys doing stuff or something.

    • I was told this slow was about a town without men, but I’m halfway through the first episode and there are so many men. so many. does this get any better?

      • A little. The first episode was particularly bad in that regard, but it does get better as it goes on. It is still mainly a story about men and their conflicts though, with the women as side stories. Someone somewhere posted a breakdown of lines spoken and it was around 75% men, 25% women.

      • The trailer made it out that way and a town with few men exists…but I’d say the majority of the story is focused on the guys, the guys backstories, etc. Leaving a host of interesting female characters without their backstories fully developed. No bury your gays–but I feel like (though was tired during the end of the show so could be wrong) they never really got a scene after surviving. I liked the show in general but felt it could have been much more interesting if it kept to its trailer plot.

      • Yeah, someone on Twitter did a count for every time a man spoke vs. woman spoke in the show (where it’s a town full of women), and it was like 75/25 in favor of men. Which, you know, seems a little off?

    • AGREED. i definitely fell in love with merritt wever in godless. she was my favorite character, and her romance with the whore-turned-schoolmarm-miss-callie-dunn was quite touching. godless was all the things i wanted in a show: cowboys, guns, horses, romance, native americans, violence, hats, and lots of interesting female characters.

    • I’m only 2 episodes in but for a show that’s being marketed as being about “a town full of women” it remarkably seems to focus on the male characters much of the time. The entire premise of the show seems to be about Frank’s hunt for Roy. The town just seems to be there for window dressing. I want to give this show a chance but I’m already annoyed at the false marketing and so much of the conflict and dialogue being centered about the men.

      Someone on Twitter figured out that the pilot had around 75% of the dialogue being delivered by men and I’d bet the second episode comes out much the same from what I saw. The show is made by men so I shouldn’t be surprised by this at all. It’s also telling that I don’t see a lot of female journalists talking about it. It would seem with good reason.

    • The best thing about this season of Godless–other than goddesses Wever and Dockery–is that they have killed off way more dudes than chicks…who dig scars.

  2. How dare you slander Archie Andrews. He’s not the best plotwise but that is because he’s a Human Golden Retriever! Once you understand this he makes perfect sense and is a delightful presence.

    The most boring character on Riverdale is Jughead.

  3. I can’t watch Riverdale bc I’m pretty sure its isn’t Afterlife With Archie levels of Incredible, like nothing that can beat that for me, the bar is too high. Speaking of if the reboot of Sabrina isn’t modeled after the current run of the comics is it even worth it

  4. I don’t want Cheryl to get with Toni, because there’s not reason for them to get together. Cheryl is a person with incredibly high standards, and wouldn’t date someone who A) wasn’t one of her peers (read as rich), and B) within her elitist social circle.

    That leaves four girls: Veronica Lodge, the rich girl from out of town, Polly Cooper, who dated and is pregnant with Cheryl’s twin brothers babies (and she’s also Cheryl’s third cousin), Betty Cooper, Polly’s little sister, AND Josie McCoy, daughter of the town’s mayor, Cheryl’s best friend, and lead singer of the Pussycats.

    Toni, on the other hand, is a Southsider (that means she’s poor), and is in a gang. She’s definitely below Cheryl’s standards.

    The only reason to throw them together is because they’d both be queer. That’s not how things work, and I don’t want that little trope.

  6. I’m completely in love with Betty Cooper and wish she was the one dating Toni… (Not that it would really make any sense but I am irrational)

  8. SO excited that there’s gonna be more riverdale coverage on autostraddle. I’ve been surviving off of Heather and Kayla’s tweets about it (the best one was about Veronica having chemistry with random objects she brushes up against, imo).

    • It’s really messed up for an ostensibly intersectional and progressive queer blog to praise Riverdale, a show that is infamous among the asexual community for erasing the sexuality of one of the few mainstream asexual characters in media.

      Throwing in a token storyline about a bisexual woman doesn’t begin to negate the harm this show has done in erasing one of the most misunderstood and marginalized identities in the queer community.

  11. And with Toni’s “I like girls more” three years stolen from my life by bisexual media erasure returned to me

  12. Also – while I’m pretty sure they just robbed my closet for all of Jughead’s apparel, a nice guide on where to buy his coats would be appreciated. I think I’m missing two or three of them

  13. I feel like Jughead’s aceness is going to be something he’ll come to understand about himself within the context of Riverdale. Notice how all the sexual activity he’s been doing has been pointed out as being pretty tame – didn’t Toni say something about PG-13 groping? I know Cole Sprouse has expressed interest in exploring Jughead’s aceness too.

    As someone who took yonks to work out her own sexuality, it kind of bugs me that people expect non-het characters (especially teens) to automatically KNOW right off the bat what they are – I find those kinds of depictions really unrelatable. I’d feel much more connected with a character that’s testing out the edges of their sexuality to see where they’re at.

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