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After spending seven seasons as Betty Cooper on "Riverdale," Lili Reinhart officially ranked every season of the series. The show started as a grounded teen mystery before veering into cults, time travel, and gargoyle storylines that kept audiences guessing.
The CW drama "Riverdale" debuted in January 2017 as a grounded noir mystery centered on the death of high schooler Jason Blossom.
After its first season streamed on Netflix, the show exploded into a global phenomenon, driving a 400% surge in teenage viewership for its Season 2 premiere.
Over seven seasons, showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa progressively abandoned realistic teen drama for genre escalation. The series pivoted from murder mysteries into a tabletop-game cult, organ-harvesting villains, witchy crossovers, and supernatural abilities such as telepathy and invulnerability.
Lili Reinhart ranked the series in chronological order, putting Season 1 at the top and Season 7 at the bottom.
She identified the show's key turning points from Season 2's Black Hood thriller and Season 3's Gryphons & Gargoyles cult to Season 5's seven-year time jump and Season 6's superpowers.
Reflecting on Season 7's 1950s timeline reset, Reinhart noted that while she enjoyed filming the entire run, the show "quite literally" lost the plot as the storylines escalated.
Beyond naming Season 1 her favorite, Reinhart highlighted several specific storylines from across the show's run.
The actress singled out Season 7’s final arc, which introduced a four-way relationship between the main cast, Betty, Archie, Jughead, and Veronica, noting that the storyline introduced her to a whole new relationship structure.
When shown co-star Camila Mendes's ranking, which placed Season 7 near the top, Reinhart expressed surprise. While maintaining that she enjoyed filming the 1950s arc, Reinhart noted she ranked it at the bottom because she couldn't wrap her head around "how we got there."
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