Archie And Betty And Veronica And Zombies

How a 76-year-old gang of teenagers wound up fighting the undead, meeting the Ramones, and starring in a sex-infused murder-mystery show on the CW.

- Abraham Riesman

ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA is sitting in a booth at Pop Tate’s Chock’lit Shoppe, picking out a weapon for Archie. It’s a gray autumn day in a suburb of Vancouver, and the wiry 40-something-year-old writer-producer is on the set of Riverdale, his eerie modernized television take on the Archie Comics mythos. In the show, the venerable pop-culture foursome—Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead—set out to solve the murder of one of their classmates. Late in the first season, Archie—for reasons that I’ll leave unsaid—finds himself holding a knife. This afternoon, the prop master is presenting Aguirre-Sacasa with two blade options and recommending the smaller one.

“Once it’s in the neck, you could even, maybe, have it not all the way in,” the prop master suggests. There’s a yet more macabre reason to go with the smaller option, he says: “I think the makeup people will have a hard time hiding the big one and getting that body into the barrel.”

“I agree,” Aguirre-Sacasa says, nodding. “Smaller is better. I like that.”

Knives in necks? Bodies in barrels? What on earth has happened to our dear Archiekins? Seeing the reflexive look of shock on my face, Aguirre-Sacasa assures me that the gruesome and the heartwarming are not mutually exclusive. “People say, ‘I hear you’re doing dark Archie,’ ” he says. “We’re not doing dark Archie. We’re doing an Archie that mixes dark and light.”