Riverdale opens on a body. Jason Blossom goes out on a boat with his twin sister on the Fourth of July and never comes back, and the town spends the rest of the first season pulling apart the lie that everyone agreed to tell about what happened at Sweetwater River. That single choice explains the whole show. The characters come from Archie Comics, a property that has been publishing wholesome small-town gags since 1941, and the series takes those same names and drops them into a story about murder, blackmail, drug labs, and family money with blood on it. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who was already writing for Archie Comics when the adaptation was developed, built the version that premiered on The CW in January 2017.
The result is a teen drama that keeps swerving into other genres. One season runs on a serial killer plot, another on a cult, another on organized crime and a private prison. Whatever the plot machinery, the show is held together by a small group of teenagers who keep deciding that the adults are either compromised or absent, and that solving things themselves is the only option left.
Placement across that whole cast, the core four through the Serpents, the Blossoms, and the parents whose choices set most of the trouble in motion, hinges on how loyalty, ambition, and secrets hold up once doing the right thing costs something.
The results are meaningfully different people. Betty Cooper is the honor student whose competence is partly armor, a person who investigates compulsively and carries a genuinely frightening capacity for anger under the neat exterior. Veronica Lodge arrives from New York trying to outrun her father’s reputation, and her way of proving she is not Hiram involves the same appetite for control and leverage that made him what he is. Jughead Jones narrates the series from the outside, more comfortable in a diner booth with a typewriter than in any room where he is expected to belong, and his eventual place among the Southside Serpents is less rebellion than the first group that took him as he was. Cheryl Blossom starts as a cruel rich girl and grows into something more complicated, grieving her twin and running her family name like a weapon she never asked to inherit. Fred Andrews sits at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from Hiram Lodge, a contractor and single father whose steady decency is one of the few fixed points the town has, and the death of actor Luke Perry in 2019 was written into the show as the loss of exactly that.
A quiz like this works only if you answer as yourself rather than as the character you would prefer to be. Someone who defuses conflict and someone who escalates it will land in very different places here, and so will the person who keeps a secret to protect a friend and the person who tells the truth no matter what it breaks.
Possible results:
- Archie Andrews
- Betty Cooper
- Veronica Lodge
- Jughead Jones
- Cheryl Blossom
- Josie McCoy
- Kevin Keller
- Reggie Mantl
- Toni Topaz
- Fangs Fogarty
- Tabitha Tate
- Hiram Lodge
- Fred Andrews
- Sweet Pea
- Hal Cooper
