How Never Have I Ever can avoid a sophomore slump and become more durable than Riverdale

Vox

"The joy of Never Have I Ever is that it is emotionally grounded in very normal, and often very petty, teen drama," says Constance Grady. "The Riverdale and Never Have I Ever models are both valid ways of making teen shows, and neither one is really better or worse than the other. But one of those models is certainly a hell of a lot more durable than the other. Outlandish teen soaps like Riverdale — and before it, Gossip Girl, The O.C., and 90210 — tend to burn brightly and flame out fast. They usually have buzzy, much-discussed, and action-packed first seasons, and then they fall apart in season two, unable to sustain their momentum. They often run for multiple seasons (Riverdale is currently on its fourth and has been renewed for a fifth), but usually without the sizable audiences or the level of creative energy that animated the first season. In contrast, more grounded shows like Never Have I Ever tend not to generate the mouth-agape chatter that their scandalous teen soap peers do. Often, these shows are so quiet that they don’t find an audience in time and get canceled after just one season. (Netflix’s Everything Sucks; Freaks and Geeks; the OG, My So-Called Life.) But when shows like Never Have I Ever manage to stick around past season one — shows like Gilmore Girls and Derry Girls and American Vandal and Friday Night Lights — they tend to be built to last. Their second seasons can be just as good as their first. I thoroughly enjoyed Riverdale’s first season. But I was also worried by the season finale that the show had run out of story to tell. The second season did nothing to salve my worries, and by the third season, the show had departed from reality so thoroughly that I lost interest and dropped it."

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