Riverdale features a character whose (incest-having? Probably.) brother is murdered, who becomes a leader of a bow-wielding vigilante club of women (this is not the only vigilante club in the show, mind you), whose grandmother becomes inhabited by the undying spirit of an ancient witch (also this character is herself a witch), whose family estate was built on a mine full of ghosts and also the mine contains lots of palladium which her Russian spy parents try to use to build a bomb (oh also she kills her dad and burns the mansion down early in the show but it’s fine, they just rebuild it and also there are alternate universe shenanigans), who gains fire-based superpowers and destroys a comet, who keeps her dead taxidermied brother around in a shrine-room (when he’s not alive again for whatever reason)… and that’s like 20% of the insane shit that happens with that character
who is not even a main character. There are characters with
way weirder sets of events in their biography. Also she’s in high school and a cheerleader, because why not? I think maybe she saves one of her lovers from the afterlife, too.
It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.
I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.