“Riverdale” Boss Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa Previews Season 4: Talks Memorial, The Farm, & Burning of the Beanie

Season 4 of The CW’s subversive teen drama Riverdale is just hours away from making its premiere. A few months ago, OMFGTV sat down with the cast and showrunner of the series, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, to discuss what fans can expect for this season and the gang’s senior year of high school.

The season opener, titled “In Memoriam,” is a standalone episode and a farewell to Fred Andrews and the late Luke Perry. In the episode, Archie (KJ Apa) receives a phone call that will change the rest of his life forever. For Aguirre-Sacasa, who has worked in television for 13 years, he says the table read for the episode was like one he’s never experienced before.

“It was the first time that all of us were in one room sitting around a table kind of talking about [losing Luke],” the showrunner tells us. “A lot of us started crying. We were all emotional.” When it came time to shoot the episode, Roberto wasn’t in Vancouver for all of it, but says he knows it was hard for the cast and crew, adding: “I’ve seen the footage and it’s wonderful. I hope it will be a real tribute and honor to Luke. That’s the goal.”

After “In Memoriam,” Riverdale goes right back to farm territory. In the Season 3 finale, viewers of the series discovered that Alice Cooper (Mädchen Amick) has been working with the FBI as an informant with none other than Betty’s real brother Charles (Wyatt Nash). We also know we have not seen the last of recurring guest star Chad Michael Murray. Aguirre-Sacasa says that though we’re not done with The Farm, that arc is nearing its end.

“Episode 3 is our big farm episode and I think it brings this chapter of that story to a close,” he says. “It’s like Dog Day Afternoon. It’s a huge kind of action movie. It’s really fun with Betty trying to get her mom  out of the farm once and for all.”

Most of the season will be a lot more based at the high school because it’s the group’s last year. With the exception of episode 3, Season 4 will show an awareness that this year is their last year for prom, their last musical, their last football season. “So we’re really embracing that,” he says. In addition to more football stories (football was such a big part of Archie’s life), there will be a lot more friendship stories as well.

[adinserter block=”1″]

In the second installment of the season, “Fast Times at Riverdale High,” Roberto reveals that it includes a “really wonderful” story featuring Betty (Lili Reinhart) and Kevin (Casey Cott). “They were best friends in the pilot,” he says. “He used to hang at her house all the time. I’m excited about doing that. It’s been really nice.”

After all the craziness from the previous seasons, he shares that the new season is “going to be a bit quieter, bittersweet. I’m excited about it. This year we do high school or that’s it.”

As for Season 4’s musical episode, the showrunner explains that he doesn’t quite know yet what the musical will be, and choosing which musical they’ll do is not as simple as it may seem. The musical chosen has to somehow tie in with the story of the show, and storywise, he does not know yet where they’ll be around the episode 16 or 17 mark.

“It has to be the right musical that we can get the rights to, that have songs that makes sense for the kids, that fit in for whatever story we’re doing,” he says. “But we really want to do it. It’s become kind of a little bit of a tradition. While we will have to wait for the second half of the season, he adds: “We’ll be doing musical numbers as usual throughout the season as well.”

The most alarming moment of last season’s finale was the flashforward, which jumped ahead to spring of the gang’s senior year. In the scene, we see Betty, Veronica (Camila Mendes) and a bloodied Archie holding and subsequently tossing Jughead’s iconic beanie into a fire. What the hell happened?! Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa breaks it down on how that story will unfold.

“The first half of the season will be building up to the night that Jughead’s beanie was burned,” he explains. “Throughout that, we’re going to be seeing flashforwards in every episode that fill in the story.” We are going to guess that the mid-season finale will then play out what exactly happened. “The second half of the season will be playing the fallout from that night.

“It’s a different way for us to tell a mystery and I”m really, really excited about it.”

Riverdale Season 4 premieres Wednesday, October 9 at 8pm on The CW.