My friends don’t understand it, even my sister cannot comprehend it, and my parents shake their heads in disbelief every time it emerges onto the TV screen. We all have a guilty pleasure, a dark secret that looms large at night when all else is silent, and my secret is this: I unironically love Riverdale — and I’m not ashamed to say it. For all its wacky plot lines, confusing characters, and cringe-inducing dialogue, I can’t get enough.

For those who don’t know, Riverdale, first aired in 2017, is a (very loose) TV adaptation of Archie Comics, following the lives and times of four teenagers living in the elusive town of Riverdale. Season one starts off as a murder mystery, but we are quickly sucked into a world of serial killers, drug dealers, and Griffins & Gargoyles. If you’re confused, you’ve understood what the show is about.

“Pop culture has a virtual obsession with hating on the show”

But one overarching phenomenon of the show is the disparagement it invites from critics: pop culture has a virtual obsession with hating on the show. My first introduction to the programme was watching YouTube compilations of its horrific dialogue, or interviews with the cast members who so obviously had had enough with defending the nonsensical plot lines writers had devised. Yet, it continues to capture the imagination of the media masses: it has been nominated for multiple Teen Choice and MTV awards, accruing over two million viewers at the season two premiere in 2017. And from what it looks like, with six strong seasons under its belt, Riverdale isn’t going anywhere soon.

But what this show signifies to me is larger than the sum of its parts. It is not just a badly written programme that happened to become a teen phenomenon, but is indicative of a larger conversation about what makes good TV. The first things that come to my mind are the following: an engaging plotline, (at least some) likeable characters, and realistic dialogue. Even I would concede that without these basic components, you don’t interest the viewer enough to stick out the first episode.

But many might argue that Riverdale doesn’t have any of these things just mentioned, begging the question: why on earth do I seem to like it so much? It could be that the problem lies with me (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m weird, I’m a weirdo) — maybe my taste in TV is just plain wrong, but I know I am not the only one to remain strangely compelled by the show. I’d argue that plot, dialogue, and cinematography are important aspects of the creative process, but not as important as recognising the main reason why we watch TV: escapism. In order to facilitate escapism, there need to be clearly defined entities that one is escaping from and into. In the case of Riverdale, I leave the stressful Cambridge workload behind for a world where the foremost concern of a bunch of 17-year-olds is uncovering the masked Gargoyle terrorising Riverdale residents, or a place where it is acceptable to say your friend’s dad is looking very “DILFy” today.

“What Riverdale represents is a universe that eschews technicality in favour of blatant insanity”

More generally, Riverdale and programmes like it set up a fictional world so radically distinct from our own that it cannot help but intrigue us — whether positively or negatively is up to the viewer. It is a world that is at once a mirror image of our own but distorted in fundamental ways, and it is these distortions that draw us in, so that what Riverdale represents is a universe that eschews technicality in favour of blatant insanity, forcing the viewer’s suspension of disbelief to work overtime.

Furthermore, I think this is what provides a foundation for discerning the mass popularity of “trash” teen dramas: everything from Pretty Little Liars and The O. C., to cult-classics Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill. While perhaps failing to adhere to the “standard” criteria of award-winning television (they are not How to Get Away with Murder, or Breaking Bad), the worlds they create — perfectly capturing those years of frustrating adolescence balanced on the cusp of independence — turn them into time capsules of the early 2000s.

And perhaps this is what Riverdale is doing for our generation: forming the present nostalgia that will draw us back to its story ten, or twenty years down the line. This is what makes great TV, where the intangible worlds the characters inhabit are the worlds young people also want to inhabit, the worlds they love to laugh at because they are so different and yet not so dissimilar from our own, and the nostalgia they conjure remains strangely compelling to the modern teen.

I’m not saying that Riverdale is 2022’s Gossip Girl, or even that they draw the same crowds, but they are both shows that remind us why we love television: simply for the fact that it is not real life.