LA VIE BOHÈME ! [ RANTS & CRACK ]

so... that heathers episode of riverdale...

The following gif seen above describes
How I felt about this crossover.

DISCLAIMER:
I did not watch the full episode in question.
I am only commenting on the musical numbers
The cast of Riverdale performed,
And have nothing against them as people,
Nor am I judging their acting abilities.
These are also my own subjective opinions,
And we are allowed to disagree.

Welp... it looks like mainstream entertainment media has does something to piss off the theatre fandom yet again. Now what is that you may ask? Oh yeah, if you've been living under a rock for the past couple months, you might've not known that the CW did an episode of Riverdale centered around Heathers: The Musical!

So the creators of Riverdale first announced this episode last January, and as you can guess, it was met with a MASSIVE level of backlash! Members of the theatre community, and the Heathers fandom overall hated the idea of this concept! I don't think I have seen this much backlash from the Heathers fandom since there was that attempt of a Heathers reboot that was made into a tv series! *side note: I did watch the pilot episode of the modernized Heathers reboot and it was... yikes.*

I think the one who really described the backlash perfectly, was one of my favorite theatre YouTubers, Katherine Steele ( shoutout to the rest of the Theatre Thursday Fam! ). She did a video that covered the backlash of the crossover, and the way she put into words was honestly so on point! So basically she summed it up was that instead of the creators trying to expose Riverdale fans, but they were trying to expose musical theatre fans to Riverdale. Essentially, they were trying to pander to the theatre community in order to gain more viewership for the show. This is honestly the best way of putting it, and I'm glad someone had the balls to say it!

Now I know that last year Riverdale did another musical episode that was themed are Carrie: The Musical, and even though I did not watch the episode or see any of the performances the cast gave, I wasn't mad at the idea of it. Honestly, I was quite happy to see the episode was being done because, Carrie is pretty underrated as it was a Broadway flop. Most theatre fans didn't even care about it until there was the off-Broadway revival back in 2012 with Christy Altomare, and Derek Klena. So whenever I saw that the episode was announced, I was honestly pleasantly surprised with how much I liked the idea of it. Seeing an extremely popular teen drama that has a huge influence in pop culture at the moment give such an underrated show a spotlight warmed my heart.