"Shows naturally evolve, and plenty go off the rails in the pursuit of longevity, but no show has deviated as far from its starting point as Riverdale has throughout its five-plus seasons," says Kaitlin Thomas. "From murderous nuns and diabolical boardgames to teenage witches and parallel universes, the CW show is a far cry from the delightfully retro but relatively grounded small-town murder mystery it started as. Since its debut in 2017, Riverdale has grown into one of the wildest and weirdest shows of the last decade, so much so that it’s impossible to say where it will go next. In fact, the only thing you can predict is that you can’t predict it. The sole piece of pop culture that comes close to this sort of narrative transformation is the Fast & Furious franchise, which evolved from a similarly grounded film about an undercover cop infiltrating the world of street racing to Ludacris and Tyrese going to space. So as preposterous as it sounds, Riverdale has become—or is in the process of becoming—the The Fast and the Furious of television."