Riverdale Needs To Stop Doing Musical Episodes

Riverdale’s latest musical episode features songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch – and makes a strong case for the show ending its annual musicals.

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Riverdale may be a show that’s beloved by its fans for its sheer escalating ridiculousness, but even Riverdale needs to start drawing the line at full-blown musical episodes. The latest episode of Riverdale season 4, “Wicked Little Town,” sees Kevin’s desire to sing a number from Hedwig and the Angry Inch at Riverdale High’s variety show run up against opposition from Principal Honey, who considers the musical inappropriate for high school students.

This isn’t the first time Riverdale has done a musical episode, though the two previous takes on the format were based around actual productions of musicals that the school put on. Season 2’s “A Night To Remember” saw Cheryl playing the title role in a production of Carrie: The Musical, and season 3’s “Big Fun” featured the kids putting on their version of Heathers: The Musical.

With musical episodes three seasons in a row, Riverdale has reached a place where these episodes have become a tradition, so that fans can look forward (or not, as the case may be) to musical episodes in season 5, season 6, and beyond. But it’s not to late to end the tradition early and stop doing Riverdale musical episodes altogether. Here’s why they probably should.

Musical Episodes Are Best Done Only Once

Riverdale is by no means the first TV show to have a special musical episode. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had “Once More With Feeling,” Scrubs had “My Musical,” The Flash had “Duet,” and Oz had “Variety,” to name just a few. Significantly, though, all of those shows have the musical episode: they did it once, and never again. Riverdale, meanwhile, has done musical episodes based on Heathers, Carrie, and now Hedwig and the Angry Inch, meaning that there’s no longer a definitive musical episode of Riverdale.

Those other musical episodes also demonstrated an understanding that a non-musical show can’t suddenly take a hard left swerve into the musical genre without some kind of justification for the audience. In “Once More With Feeling,” the town of Sunnydale is plagued by a demon who forces people to sing and dance until they die. In “My Musical,” a patient at Sacred Heart Hospital suffers from a bizarre brain condition that causes her to hear everything in song. In “Duet,” the Flash and Supergirl find themselves facing off against the Music Meister, and “Variety” was about a prison variety show.

Given how often suspension of disbelief is required when watching Riverdale (this season has already featured an organ-farming cult leader attempting to escape justice in a homemade rocket while wearing an Evel Knievel costume), the show elects to skip any explanation for why characters are suddenly bursting into song with no stage, music-loving demon, or comic book supervillain required. In doing so, “Wicked Little Town” makes a strong case for why musical episodes need that justification, however thin. A clip in which Betty and Jughead are having an argument, only for Jughead to suddenly start singing “Exquisite Corpse” and throwing things around the room, has gone viral on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.

Riverdale’s Musical Episodes Slow The Story Down

Filler episodes of TV shows are rarely fun for audiences, and finding space for five or six musical numbers in an episode inevitably means putting the story on hold so that everyone can sing and dance for a few minutes. After the rather dull Black Hood mystery of season 2 and the overly drawn-out Gargoyle King plotline of season 3, Riverdale season 4 has actually been back on form with a story arc involving a prep school secret society, missing students, a conspiracy behind a series of popular mystery novels, an unexplained suicide, and Jughead’s apparent murder by Betty. The show’s storytelling is arguably the strongest now that it’s been since the investigation into Jason Blossom’s murder in season 1.

The majority of the aforementioned storylines were wrapped up before Riverdale’s hiatus, so perhaps there’s no better time than now for an episode that lets the show take a bit of a breather. Yet Riverdale could have made a much stronger return if it had dived headfirst into a compelling new mystery with some major plot set-up. Instead, the only things that happen in “Wicked Little Town” that remotely move the story along are Betty and Archie kissing each other (cheating on Jughead and Veronica in the process), and Jughead receiving a tape that features an apparent murder and creepy masks of himself and Betty.

Riverdale’s Musical Interludes Can Be Great (When Done Right)

Another reason why Riverdale’s musical episodes don’t work as well as those featured in other shows is that Riverdale is already a show with frequent musical interludes, so characters singing doesn’t really feel like a special event. Veronica regularly sings at her nightclub, La Bonne Nuit, and the show even has its very own pop group pulled straight from the pages of Archie Comics: Josie and the Pussycats. When executed well, these musical numbers can actually be a lot of fun – like when Riverdale High’s cheerleaders showed up outside the prison where Archie was incarcerated to serenade a football game with a rendition of “Jailhouse Rock.”

Kevin singing “Tear Me Down” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch at a school variety show, or even at one of Riverdale’s many other music venues, could have been a lot better if it was a featured song, rather than Hedwig songs making up the entire episode. Instead, characters are forced to express their relationship drama through songs with lyrics that only sort of fit, and Kevin (a character whose arcs are chronically under-written) ends up getting lost in the noise of an episode that could have been about his moment of triumph. By the end of “Wicked Little Town” he’s been downgraded from the star of the show to a keyboard player and backup singer in Archie’s band.

Musical shows can be done well, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Galavant, and even the much-maligned Glee have proven. But while Riverdale’s showrunners are clearly enthusiastic about making musical episodes, they’ve repeatedly proven unpopular with fans for all the reasons listed above. When it comes to music in Riverdale, a little goes a long way.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/riverdale-musical-episodes-bad-hedwig/