After seven seasons of triumphs and defeats, epic highs and lows on The CW’s Riverdale… the titular town might be headed back to our television screens in an wild way.
According to a new report from Deadline, Warner Bros. Television and Disney+ are collaborating on a live-action television adaptation of Afterlife with Archie, the 2013 comic series written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by Francesco Francavilla. Aguirre-Sacasa, who later went on to create Riverdale and its spinoffs Katy Keene and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, will serve as an executive producer on the TV adaptation, which has a script-to-series commitment. Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter, who were also involved with Riverdale (and, truthfully, the majority of The CW’s programming in the late 2010s), will be returning as executive producers alongside Jimmy Gibbons, Leigh London Redman, and Archie’s Jon Goldwater.
As the title suggests, Afterlife with Archie is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Riverdale, described as “a nightmare-fueled hellscape overrun with flesh-eating zombies.” The comic follows Archie, Betty, Veronica, and those in their orbit as they navigate through the apocalypse… either on the side of the survivors, or the zombies. While it only ran for ten issues, Afterlife with Archie arguably became a watershed moment in the quaint and timeless energy of Archie Comics reaching a modern audience. It led to Aguirre-Sacasa becoming the Chief Creative Officer of Archie Comics, and it spawned a series of disparately-connected horror spinoffs, including the now-famous Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as well as Jughead: the Hunger and Vampironica.
Wait, what?!
As a disciple of Riverdale‘s seven-season run (who started covering the show’s series premiere during my very first week of writing professionally), I went through a lot of emotions when first seeing this Afterlife with Archie news.
It isn’t the only classic teen property that Berlanti’s team is developing for a new audience, as they are actively working on a live-action Scooby-Doo! series for Netflix. It also isn’t the first new show of Aguirre-Sacasa’s to be put into development, including (most recently) an adaptation of the Bat Boy urban legend that was announced last year. It isn’t even the only Archie adaptation that’s in the works to begin with, with comic writer and Lanterns co-creator Tom King currently penning a movie adaptation at Universal Pictures.
And yet, a part of me was still shocked to see that Afterlife with Archie might actually get adapted into another medium, much less with the same creative team as Riverdale. As that show zigzagged through its larger-than-life storylines of murder, street drugs, cults, dimensional beings, and time travel, it somehow never did even a single zombie-themed episode. In hindsight, this is kind of shocking, especially as the show served as such a love letter to genre storytelling, to the point of naming its early episodes after horror movies and having multiple spooky standalone bottle episodes.
But the prospect of Aguirre-Sacasa, Berlanti, and company making a new Archie Comics show surprised me the most because… it was something I was convinced would never happen again. When Riverdale concluded its run in 2023, it genuinely felt like the last of a bygone era: the teen drama that can run on a major network for 20+ episodes a season, dominating the cultural conversation in the process.
Sure, the show was so much weirder than your average Dawson’s Creek or Gilmore Girls, or even its next-door neighbors in The CW’s Arrowverse… but maybe we all needed that specific brand of weird. And that weirdness still didn’t stop the show from being emotionally fulfilling, as evident by the fact that I still can’t even think about the Luke Perry tribute episode without crying. If Afterlife with Archie comes to fruition, it probably won’t have as many episodes in a season or have as many of us in a narrative chokehold, but I’m still delighted by the idea that we can get more Archie-themed storytelling from this specific group of creators.
Now, to address the question that seems to be on everyone’s minds: will Afterlife with Archie be a direct spinoff of Riverdale? I wouldn’t rule out some ancillary side characters being the same (after all, Aguirre-Sacasa technically already did the same with Riverdale and his Pretty Little Liars spinoff), but I would be shocked if the main cast reprised their roles. The perfect finality of Riverdale‘s ending, and this new show being so many years later and on an entirely new streaming platform makes me think as much. Plus, there’s the fact that members of the cast are already busy adapting hit romance novels and creating surprisingly-catchy music/performance art.
The beauty of characters like Archie, Betty, Jughead, and Veronica is that they are iconic enough to live on in different interpretations, so I could see an entirely new cast stepping in to kill zombies and steal our hearts in the process.
(featured image: The CW)
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