Frenemies Forever: Why Riverdale Keeps Burning Down Its Female Friendships

Let's talk about Betty and Veronica for a second.

The very first episode of Riverdale opens with a promise. Two girls — one the quintessential girl-next-door, one the reformed mean girl — choose each other. They share a milkshake at Pop's. They defend each other against a predatory football player. The show frames their friendship as its emotional core, a modern update of the classic Archie Comics dynamic with actual depth and feminist energy.

Then the show spends seven seasons systematically dismantling that promise every time the writers need something to happen.

Betty and Veronica's friendship isn't the only casualty. It's just the most visible one. Across its entire run, Riverdale treats female solidarity as a resource to be depleted rather than a foundation to be built on. The women of Riverdale are at their most interesting when they're working together — and the show almost never lets them do that for long.

The Setup Always Promises More Than the Follow-Through

Riverdale is genuinely good at introducing female dynamics with real potential. Cheryl and Toni? A relationship that felt like it could anchor an entire season, built on vulnerability, trauma, and genuine chemistry. Veronica and her mother Hermione? A complicated mother-daughter power struggle that had layers. Betty and Polly? Sisters navigating shared trauma and wildly different responses to it.

Every single one of these relationships gets introduced with care and then discarded or corrupted when the plot needs fuel. Cheryl and Toni's relationship becomes a backdrop for increasingly cartoonish drama rather than a genuine emotional throughline. Hermione Lodge becomes a villain prop rather than a fully realized character in her own right. Polly Cooper gets written off in a way so abrupt it felt almost punitive.

The pattern is consistent enough that it stops feeling like individual creative decisions and starts feeling like a philosophy: female relationships in Riverdale exist to be broken.

Romantic Triangles as Female Friendship Killers

A huge part of the problem is the show's obsession with love triangles — specifically, love triangles that require women to compete. The Betty-Archie-Veronica triangle was always going to be central to any Archie Comics adaptation. That's fine. But Riverdale's version of that triangle consistently framed Betty and Veronica's friendship as secondary to their shared interest in Archie, even when the show claimed to be doing the opposite.

There's a particular kind of narrative sleight of hand that Riverdale pulls repeatedly: it has characters say that their friendship is more important than any guy, while simultaneously structuring every major conflict around romantic competition. Betty and Veronica declare their bond unbreakable in one scene and then spend the next three episodes in tension over Archie's attention. The words and the story don't match.

This matters because audiences absorb both. You can tell viewers that female friendship is the point all you want, but if the plot keeps proving otherwise, the message that lands is the one the story actually tells.

Cheryl Blossom and the Problem of Isolated Queerness

Cheryl deserves a separate conversation, because her arc represents one of Riverdale's most significant missed opportunities when it comes to female community.

Cheryl is one of the most compelling characters the show ever produced — theatrical, wounded, genuinely funny, and carrying generational trauma that the show occasionally handles with real sensitivity. Her relationship with Toni gave her something she'd never had: a soft landing. A person who saw through the performance.

But Riverdale never built a broader female community around Cheryl. She remained an island — occasionally allied with the core group, frequently antagonistic toward it, never fully integrated into any sustained female friendship network. The show used her queerness as a character note without exploring what it might mean for her to find solidarity with other women, queer or otherwise.

Instead, Cheryl's relationships with other female characters are almost always competitive or transactional. She's either the threat or the obstacle. For a character with that much potential to be a vehicle for genuine female connection, that's a real loss.

The Rotating Alliance Problem

One of Riverdale's structural habits is what you might call the rotating alliance — the way characters shift between friend and foe depending on what the current season needs. This affects male characters too, but it hits female characters harder because the show never builds enough consistent goodwill between its women to survive the betrayals.

When Jughead and Archie fall out and make up, there's history there. The audience has watched them build something. When Betty and Veronica cycle through another falling-out, it often feels like the show just needed conflict and grabbed the nearest available female relationship to generate it.

The result is that by the later seasons, it becomes genuinely difficult to invest in any alliance between female characters because you know it won't hold. Not because the show has earned that cynicism through authentic storytelling, but because it has trained you to expect the rug pull.

What a Different Show Might Have Done

Here's the thing — Riverdale had the raw material for something genuinely interesting. A show about women in a corrupt small town, navigating family legacy, class dynamics, and personal ambition while also holding each other up? That's a compelling premise. The cast was more than capable of delivering it.

Imagine a version of Riverdale where Veronica's Lodge Industries storyline was built around her and Betty working in actual sustained partnership rather than occasional uneasy alliance. Where Cheryl's Blossom Farms arc involved real mentorship or solidarity with another female character. Where Josie — criminally underused before her departure — got to be part of a genuine female ensemble rather than a peripheral figure.

The pieces were there. The show just kept choosing competition over community, betrayal over trust, and drama over depth.

Why It Matters Beyond the Screen

This isn't just about fictional characters. The way stories portray female relationships has real cultural weight, especially in media aimed at younger audiences. Riverdale built a massive following among teenage girls and young women — an audience that was watching these dynamics play out and absorbing the implicit message that female friendships are inherently fragile, that women will always ultimately compete over men, and that solidarity is a temporary state at best.

The show could have pushed back against that narrative. It had the platform and, at times, the apparent intention. But intention without follow-through is just marketing.

Riverdale's female characters are, individually, some of the most watchable people on the show. Together, they deserved so much better than what the writers gave them — which was, repeatedly, each other's throats.

Maybe that's the real dark secret Riverdale never wanted to examine too closely.