So, first, some context for why I’m writing a review for this. I have never seen Riverdale and have no real interest in, so it might seem odd that I randomly watched the 18th episode of the second season with no other background on it. However, I read Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie, earlier this year, and after reading it I decided that I wanted to see all of the adaptations that have come out of it. Well, on the Wikipedia page for Carrie, it lists “Riverdale: A Night to Remember” as a Carrie adaptation, so I gave it a shot.
More specifically, A Night to Remember is a loose adaptation of Carrie: The Musical, which is the flop musical based on Carrie that came out in the 80s (I did also review this, if anyone’s interested). So, without any real context of what happened in the episodes of Riverdale prior to A Night to Remember, as far as I could tell it was about the cast of characters putting on a high school production of Carrie: The Musical. In this process, they find that the characters they’re portraying start to represent a bit of what their actual lives are like, and so the kids start going through the same beats as their characters. Or…at least, that’s what this special episode was advertised as, when in reality it just felt like a whole bunch of nonsense.
I’m not gonna lie, I hated every minute of A Night to Remember, and I thought it was the worst Carrie adaptation I’d ever seen. The only thing that I can’t 100% begrudge the episode on is the plot making no sense, because obviously part of the blame is on me for watching one random episode with no background on the series. I didn’t think this would be such a big deal, but it really felt like it was more about whatever the hell was going on in Riverdale at the time than it was any sort of adaptation of Carrie: The Musical. I’ve never had any real interest in watching Riverdale before, but I know I’ll never watch it after seeing A Night to Remember. I remember hearing praise about this show in the past, but this episode certainly didn’t make me want to watch any of the others. I thought that the acting was horrendous and the storylines were some of the dumbest I’ve ever seen on a TV show.
I know that this is an odd review for me to be writing, since the vast majority of people watching this will be watching it because they’re fans of Riverdale, not because it’s a Carrie adaptation. I may not know how this episode fares in the grand scheme of the show, but I can tell that you as a Carrie adaptation it fails on every level. Outside of having the names of the characters and musical performances, A Night to Remember has little to do with Carrie: The Musical. I think it’s a really odd choice that any show would want to do an adaptation of Carrie: The Musical anyway, though, because it’s really not a good musical. So, as I was watching these terrible characters do their musical numbers on the show, all I could think was that I was watching shitty covers of already shitty songs.
I honestly found there to be hardly anything redeeming about Riverdale: A Night to Remember. I’d be curious to see what fans of the show thought of it, and also why anyone likes this show to begin with. Because from where I was sitting, this was a bad show doing a bad adaptation of a bad musical. The only thing I found comfort in watching this was that there’s an extremely high likelihood that I’ll die before ever having to watch it again.
1/5
