Picture Archie Andrews all grown up. Imagine the amiable, athletic redhead who’s eternally trapped between his beautiful blonde and brunette BFFs a few decades down the line. DidLouis C.K.immediately spring to mind? Probably not, but if you’re a believer in alternate universes, there might just be one out there where the sardonic comedian played the iconic all-American comic book boy-next-door in a high-concept time-travel movie…. or one with portals. Portals are so hot right now.
At the end of the month, The CW will debut their wonderfully juicy teen dramaRiverdale, which re-envisions theArchiemythos through the lens of a sexy small-town noir. Throwing murder into the mix is already a pretty big shakeup forArchiepurists, but according toRiverdaleExecutive Producer and Chief Creative Officer of Archie ComicsRobertoAguirre-Sacasa,things could have been a lot weirder.
During Riverdale’s panel at theTCApress tour, Aguirre-Sacasa shared an anecdote that sounds alarmingly like a Jack Donaghy pitch session. Before he and fellow EPJon Goldwaterended up takingArchieto The CW
So we go to the kickoff meeting, and he said, “I’ve been thinking about this, and I think you guys kind of need to do something a little more highconcept, a little bigger than just a comingofage show.” And I said, “Great. We’re open to that.” He’s like, “I want you to think about time travel.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Archie traveling through time.” And I said, “Okay.”
But the studio boss wasn’t done. Don’t like time-travel? He’s got more high-concept ideas and a real doozy of a casting suggestion.
We sort of sat there. And we’re like, “Okay.” And he’s like, “It seems like you don’t like the time travel thing. I got another thing. Portals.” And I’m like, “Portals?” “Portals are huge. This is a portal to another dimension.” And we’re just sitting there like gobsmacked. And this was the greatest one, which I think is actually a funny idea. He’s like, “What if Louis C.K. is Archie?”
Nothing says “Archie Andrews” like scathing wit. In the end, the team decided that the high-concept route was “the exact opposite” of what they wanted to do and they settled on the coming-of-age neo-noirRiverdale, which the team describes asThe O.C.meetsTwin Peaks, which reductive, but not too far off.
Check out the revampedArchiewhenRiverdalepremieres Thursday, January 26, at 9 p.m. on The CW.
