When I first heard that Archie, a wholesome, vaguely toothless comic from the ’40s that has somehow managed to hang on to pop culture consciousness for dear life, was going to receive an #edgy, #dark TV reboot, I was overjoyed. Not because the idea sounded like a good one, mind you. In actuality, quite the reverse: I was excited because Sexy Archie (or Riverdale, as it has less inventively been called) sounded insanely, inanely dumb.

Streamable television has been missing dumb. Platforms like Netflix are mired deep in their own overly serious coming-of-age, spouting half-formed philosophies while scowling in the mirror and refusing company. Everything has to be so goddamn heavy now, from comic book television (Luke Cage), to soap operas (The Crown), to crime TV (Narcos).

Nobody actually seems to be enjoying themselves anymore, and so the idea of a show actively harking back to TV’s gloriously silly age — one dominated by half-baked, sputtering sitcoms starring monkeys (Passions) or musical crime procedurals (Viva Laughlin) — represented a much-needed change of pace. After all, there’s only so much philosophical pouting you can take. Every once in a while, you need to relax with a hefty, bubbling slice of cheese; a ridiculous Dawson’s Creek/Twin Peaks hybrid for the new age.

“The Name Of Our Town Is Riverdale.”

On the dumb front, Riverdale’s first episode, ‘The River’s Edge’, delivers in spades. From the very first scene, a montage of overhead shots narrated by the show’s moral voice Jughead (Cole Sprouse), writer and creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa plays his hand.

Though the episode could loosely be described as a murder mystery, it is more Pretty Little Liars than The Killing. The overwhelming emphasis is on sexy teen Archie (K.J. Apa) and his sexy mates doing sexy teen stuff, drifting in and out of high school classes they barely pay attention to while Aguirre-Sacasa lifts off the innocent American façade and peers at the murkiness below.

Keep in mind, he does all of the above with an approach more akin to Michael Bay than David Lynch. In his opening spiel, Jughead doesn’t just introduce the show: he breaks it down into crib-notes, helpfully instructing the audience that the town of Riverdale has its fair share of “shadows underneath”. It’s as though Aguirre-Sacasa decided to cold open with the show’s own instruction manual — imagine the first scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey was just a slow pan of an itemised list of talking points handwritten by Stanley Kubrick.

It gets more inane from there. The episode’s plot hinges on the mysterious drowning of Jason Blossom, a picture-perfect young heartthrob survived by his twin sister Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch). But the gross, glorious beauty of this machine is not its engine but its accoutrements. Sure, Blossom’s death is the episode’s driving point, but it merely represents a handy way for Aguirre-Sacasa to keep people interested while he gets to his real work: orchestrating the sweaty, slow dance of teens jumping into each other’s beds, and — yes, soppily — each other’s hearts.

“Are You Familiar With The Works Of Truman Capote?”

Some critics have described Riverdale’s first episode as “self-aware”, but it’s more accurately described as self-obsessed; forever checking out its own waffly, neon-lit haze in whatever reflective surface it can find. Literary allusions are endless — Toni Morrison, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood are all namechecked within the first ten minutes, mostly by the show’s femme fatale Veronica (played by a touchingly enthusiastic Camila Mendes, in full vamp mode) — but somehow this makes the show feel dumber, not more enlightened.

Indeed, Riverdale is like a lazy student skimreading a bunch of Wikipedia pages the night before an exam, jacked up on Red Bull and possessing only the scantest work knowledge of the texts it endlessly rabbits on about. It is all magazine gloss and it knows it — Aguirre-Sacasa’s high-brow allusions are less hat tips than they are slow, exaggerated winks.

That our main character Archie (K.J. Apa) has lofty creative urges (he wants to be a musician) is in itself another MacGuffin. After all, the whole songwriting sub-plot only seems to matter insofar as it leads him to have a protracted romantic relationship with his music teacher Miss Grundy (Sarah Habel). At the end of the day, as far as Aguirre-Sacasa is concerned, all roads, no matter how artsy they might initially appear, lead back to one thing: guilty pleasures of the most base variety.

“Archie Got Hot!”

The real meat of this show is in the relationships, and the various, complex ways our characters flirt and fornicate. Archie is introduced while half-dressed and he stays that way for much of the episode; director Gabriele Muccino films his abs with all the reverence Werner Herzog reserves for the jungle.

Even when he is clothed, Archie’s mind — and the mind of the show itself, for that matter — is always in the bedroom. Flesh remains the constant source of discussion, whether Archie is moodily murmuring to his best friend Betty (Lili Reinhart), Veronica or his brawny, sweat-soaked mates. Though it is important to note that Riverdale isn’t stridently heteronormative; homosexual relationships, treated with an unusually even-hand, take up as much of the show’s running time as the heterosexual ones.

Ultimately, sex isn’t Riverdale’s subtext. The show is too swollen for such nuances; too gorged to fit in anything resembling a thematic undercurrent. It is, from start to finish, a softcore soap opera, featuring a host of love triangles and stuffed with teacher rooting, best friend rooting, car rooting and more. Sex is Riverdale, and Riverdale is sex. It may seem oversaturated, but that’s the point. Its unashamed acceptance of its own unremitting, relentless horniness is one of its greatest strengths.

If Riverdale did anything by halves, or tried to dress up its ridiculousness as a kind of sincerity, it would fail and fail miserably. Instead, it is a full-bore adolescent fantasy; a show utterly unperturbed by its own rich, teenage stink.

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The first episode of Riverdale is on Netflix now.

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Joseph Earp is a music and film critic who writes about horror cinema, bad TV, post-punk and The Muppets. He tweets at @TheUnderlook.