By the time the CW’s Riverdale aired its season finale this past August, the once-popular series wasn’t exactly the talk of the town like it used to be.
But the long-running teen drama proved it still knew how to get people buzzing when it signed off with one final “WTF?” moment to end all “WTF?” moments: It revealed its central four characters—Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead—spent their senior year in a polyamorous “quad” relationship.
Yes, Riverdale was a far cry from the wholesome, straight-laced Archie Comics it was based on, but the gag paid off—suddenly, everyone was tweeting about how wild the show was again!—albeit with some divisive reactions…
While some praised the series for its poly inclusiveness and the bold gambit to satisfy its various factions of “endgame” ‘shippers, others either lambasted the cheap thrill of it all or claimed it didn’t go far enough. (Ethical non-monogamy group OPEN slammed the reveal as inauthentic and “frustrating.”)
We’ll admit, we were pretty tickled by the brazenness of it all, but we had one big complaint ourselves: Though Riverdale made the effort to show us hook-ups between different pairings in the quad—Archie and Betty, Archie and Veronica, even Betty and Veronica—it conspicuously denied us the chance to see Archie and Jughead get it on, too.
Come on, Riverdale, no love for the man-love?
A producer for the show previously said a makeout scene for KJ Apa’s Archie and Cole Sprouse’s Jughead would’ve been “too hot for TV,” but that didn’t really answer our questions, including: Was an Archie-Jughead scene filmed but left on the cutting room floor? Was it ever part of the script? Who, if anyone, objected to it? And what’s a guy gotta do to watch Apa and Sprouse french kiss?
Well, the good people at TV Lineattempted to take those questions direct to the source and asked showrunner/creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa himself.
“We did not shoot KJ and Cole hooking up,” the Riverdale boss says definitively. As he explains it, over the prior seven seasons, the series had already explored every other possible combination of the foursome, so significant groundwork had been laid to make what we saw emotionally plausible.
“We hadn’t even really laid even the barest seed of there being a romance between Archie and Jughead,” Aguirre-Sacase continues. “Not even a whisper of that… We hadn’t really explored or even hinted at that, where we had with all the other couplings.”
Apparently, the writers did consider it, but he adds they worried it would be a “cheat” if, suddenly, the BFFs were swapping spit.
But come on, Roberto, you can’t use logic as an excuse now! After all, this is a show that featured one of its characters using their telekinetic superpowers to send everyone back in time to the ’50s to save them from an apocalyptic comet. Riverdale has never abided by any sense of reality, so why worry about that now?
Ahead of its season finale, let’s celebrate ‘Riverdale,’ a show that’s always been by and for the gays.
If it’s any consolation, the showrunner does seem a bit regretful they didn’t just throw all their cares out the window and do it.
“When I look back, wouldn’t it have been great to just pop to KJ and Cole kissing?” Aguirre-Sacasa admits. “Absolutely!… I think everyone would’ve been up for it.”
“I think Cole and KJ would’ve completely been up for it,” he adds, quashing any theories or rumors that one of the actors might’ve refused to film the scene. “Who doesn’t want to see that?”
Well, hey, when the inevitable reunion or sequel series airs however many years down the road, maybe Archie and Jughead can finally get to locking lips and make up for lost time.
