10 Awful TV Shows With Incredible First Episodes

10. Riverdale

This idea had the potential to be so much more than your run-of-the-mill teen drama. A dark reboot of Archie Comics, peeling back the saccharine layers of the small-town '50s America aesthetic to reveal a dark underbelly? All inspired by shows like Twin Peaks and with a twisted murder mystery to solve? No wonder this was greenlit.

And the pilot episode of Riverdale pretty much delivers on the promise of its premise. The son of the wealthiest family in town, Jason Blossom, washes up dead in the nearby river and nobody knows who did it. What follows in the show’s first hour is a perfect blend of high-school drama and gritty crime thrills, as long as you forget the odd subplot about Archie Andrews hooking up with his teacher.

But the next few episodes quickly signal a devolution into everything that the show is loathed for now. Illogical character decisions, horror elements thrown in seemingly at random and the high school age characters patently refusing to act like high schoolers. Once again taking inspiration from Twin Peaks, Riverdale could never quite recapture what made the pilot so special and, by most accounts, continues its steady decline downwards to this day.