If you’re a fan of The CW’s Riverdale, there are a lot of things you might have expected from the final season premiere of the series: sex, murder, and insane hijinks. What you might not expect? A serious exploration of the ramifications of the Emmett Till murder trial on small town America in the 1950s.
Yet, that’s exactly what viewers got on this week’s Riverdale Season 7 premiere, “Chapter One Hundred Eighteen: Don’t Worry Darling”. Written by showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Danielle Iman, and directed by Ronald Paul Richard, the episode finds the kids of Riverdale once again teens and attending their Junior year of high school, thanks to a magical comet that came crash-landing down on the town in the Season 6 finale. Sent back to 1955, everyone is living different, more innocent lives — except Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), who remembers everything from the first six seasons.
Seems like an inauspicious start to an episode that tackles a very serious, very real-world issue that still causes emotional pain to this very day. Yet that’s exactly the balance the writers of Riverdale tried to strike in the final season… Could they continue making the show fans know and love, while diving deep into actual issue-driven storytelling?
“When we first talked about doing the ’50s, one of the big questions that we talked about a lot in the writers room, and I talked a lot about with the cast was, are we going to play the reality of the 1950s?” Aguirre-Sacasa told Decider. “That for a certain kind of teenager they were great and super fun; and for the more marginalized groups, the characters of color, the queer characters, it was in fact a very repressive, racist, homophobic, horrible time.”
Spoilers past this point, but while Jughead tries to convince his friends that they need to get back to the future, Toni Topaz (Vanessa Morgan) and Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook) have just returned from the heartbreaking end of the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers. The trial, which lasted only five days and found an all-white, all-male jury deliberating for 67 minutes, acquitted two men for the violent beating and lynching of the 14-year-old Till.
Thankfully, instead of depicting the murder or tackling the trial head on, Riverdale shows what the impact of these events were on small towns across America. First, Toni tries to have a story published on the trial in the school newspaper. Despite the encouragement of editor Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart), the uptight principal shuts them down. Ultimately, Betty and Toni recruit Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch) to hijack the morning announcements in order to allow Toni to read Langston Hughes’s “Mississippi – 1955”, a poem written as a response to the murder of Till. And though they’re reprimanded by the school principal, a more open-minded teacher begins a conversation about how the poem made the students feel — a conversation that Jughead explains would otherwise not have begun for decades.
It’s a trenchant note not just for America, but for Riverdale the series — which struggled in early seasons with conversations surrounding race. In 2020, Morgan pointedly called the show out for its treatment of Black characters (or lack thereof), leading to a conversation with Aguirre-Sacasa that expanded her role, the behind-the-scenes staff, and added Westbrook to the cast. It arguably crested in an episode in Season 6 which found Tabitha, unstuck in time, jumping to periods of racial tension in America, including right before — and after — the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
That ties into the end of the episode, which finds a similarly unstuck in time Tabitha wiping Jughead’s memories after explaining that they didn’t stop the comet last season; but there’s still a chance for her to untangle the timelines in order to get them all back home where they belong. In the meantime, the gang needs to stay safe in the ’50s, and Jughead is left with only three words: bend towards justice. That’s an excerpt from a King quote Tabitha paraphrases, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” tying it all together (sort of).
For more on the time jump, why we were left with that quote, and whether they’ve finished writing the final season, read on.
Decider: You’re filming around Episode 13 right now and it looks like from behind the scenes stuff you’re still in the ’50s, will that be going all season long or will there be some jumping around in time?
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa: I can say that we will… The entire season will not be set in the 1950s.
Ok well, what’s it been like playing around in this era then for multiple episodes at a time?
It’s been really, really, really fun. It was creatively energizing for the writers when we landed on this concept. It’s been really, I think, fun for the cast… You’ve seen the episodes, you can probably tell the gusto with which, like, KJ and Cole have embraced the period trappings. And I think for us it was a way to go back to the Archie days which is, these kids in high school, that’s kind of what the Archie brand has been about for the last 85 years. But do it in a way that was different. It was also our last season and we didn’t want to go out on fumes, really. Honestly we didn’t want to tell stories about, you know, Betty being a therapist and treating people, and Archie trying to be a foster father to his uncle’s long lost son, and Tabitha franchising Pop’s all over the country… We just kind of wanted to go back to high school, but we didn’t want to repeat what we’d done. And of course, if you’ve seen the first few episodes you know that going back to the ’50s allowed us to go back to the animating idea of the series, which is that there’s a wholesome, innocent quality to these Archie comics, but underneath there’s these darker, more passionate roiling emotions and themes that we wanted to engage with. And the ’50s veneer allowed us to do that in, I thought, a new, fresher way.
I wanted to talk about the Emmett Till storyline in the first episode, which seems like such a tricky thing to modulate; so you’re being respectful of the subject matter, but also honoring the characters and situations at the same time. What was it like walking that line in the premiere?
You know it was funny, when we first talked about doing the ’50s, one of the big questions that we talked about a lot in the writers room, and I talked a lot about with the cast was, are we going to play the reality of the 1950s? That for a certain kind of teenager they were great and super fun; and for the more marginalized groups, the characters of color, the queer characters, it was in fact a very repressive, racist, homophobic, horrible time. And that was the first question that a lot of people were asking, when we were doing research about the period. And we had ended Season 6 with the death of James Dean, when the comet hit and all that stuff, and when we were doing research all around the time of the death of James Dean we realized there was another story that was obviously shaping the country, and that was the trial of the Emmett Till murderers. And two stories about two teenagers, completely different, that spoke to the time period. That was the idea behind that.
You end the premiere with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote, or at least part of it. Why was it important to leave people with that?
Well I believe that the quote comes from Tabitha Tate, and we had established that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of Tabitha’s heroes in this series. The idea was that in the ’50s it was a big turning point. It was before the civil rights movement exploded. It was before the counterculture erupted, it was before Vietnam, it was before all these seismic changes happened. So we thought, if we could tee up that our characters [are] on the cusp of all these social, racial, cultural, seismic shifts that were about to come, it would give the series a bit more thematic gravitas and allow us to tell more meaningful stories, along with all the fun trappings of the 1950s.
At this point are you done writing the season? Have you settled all the endgames once and for all?
[Laughs] We are not done writing the season, we are nowhere done near writing the season.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on The CW.