‘Riverdale’ Showrunner Reveals Why They Went Back to the 50s For Final Season

Riverdale‘s seventh and final season kicked off this week with the premiere, and as teased in the sixth season finale, they went back to the 1950s.

In a new interview about the premiere, showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa revealed what led them to go back to the 50s to end the show.

See what he said inside…

The writer and producer shared that they were “towards the end of breaking season six” when they found out that season seven would be the last.

“It was good timing because we were still about two episodes from the end of breaking Season 6. So we started talking about what Season 7 would look like, and spitballing on what would happen if we continued in the present and we continued with our characters in their mid-to late-20s,” he told Deadline. “We had come up with some scenarios, but I think it resonated with us that this was our last season, and every season we explored a different genre or had a big conceit. It felt like the worst thing we wanted to do was have our last season be running on fumes.”

“In a different conversation, Mark Pedowitz had mentioned to John Goldwater, who’s one of the executive producers of Riverdale, how he was sort of nostalgic for when the kids were in high school. And KJ Apa, who plays Archie, had called me and said, ‘Man, remember when I was on the football team, and I was a bulldog and there were cheerleaders?’” Roberto continued. “And we were all feeling kind of nostalgic for when the characters were in high school. The problem with going back to high school is we’ve done high school. We did four seasons of them in high school. As divisive as Riverdale can be, one thing that everyone delights in is every time we do a dream sequence or a fantasy sequence or flashback and we see the kids in their iconic Archie Comics 1950s outfits. For whatever reason, the 1950s is the decade most associated with Archie Comics.”

“I remember saying that in the room, ‘What if we do go back to high school, but what if it is the 1950s?’ We started talking about that, and we started getting really, really excited. It felt that would allow us to go back to high school in a fresh way and get back to the original thesis of the show, which is that the Archie Comics present in a wholesome, innocent, all American kind of way, but that there might be some darker themes and darker issues and more primal desires and impulses roiling underneath the surface. The ‘50s is a great decade to explore that.”

The seventh and final season of Riverdale airs weekly on Wednesday nights at 9pm ET/PT on The CW.

The series finale is set to air on Wednesday, August 23rd.

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