“Riverdale” seems determined to reference every teen drama of the past century. Illustration by Keith Negley

“Riverdale,” which airs on the CW, has a witty conceit: take the “Archie” comic-book characters, then peer at them through the neon-noir lens of “Twin Peaks.” Riverdale is now a run-down maple-syrup town, where snooty founding families are hiding dark secrets. Veronica Lodge is a Bettie Page-style bombshell; Archie Andrews is a sensitive jock with a six-pack; Betty Cooper is a virgin with a blond ponytail, but she’s also an amateur detective who takes Ritalin. The show’s banter is up to date—“What do you say, Archiekins, be the Jay to my Bey?”—and yet when teen-age girls get pregnant they’re sent away to cruel convents straight out of the nineteen-fifties. It’s camp lite, essentially, all abs and arched eyebrows. But even air quotes need something worth quoting.

Unfortunately, “Riverdale” can’t provide that. It began well enough, with a fun, moody pilot and early episodes in which an all-black Josie and the Pussycats sang “Sugar, Sugar” and a corpse was dredged from a river. With raven eyebrows and a coy pout, Camila Mendes is a charismatic blast as Veronica, lending weight to a character who could easily be a cliché vamp. The show has flair: it’s all saturated khaki green and ruby red, the lighting in Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe as gloomy as an Edward Hopper painting. But, seven episodes in, it’s devolved into dull cosplay bracketed by bogus profundity. Betty and Veronica don kink-wear and roofie Chuck Clayton, a slut-shaming football player. The girls’ tart-tongued gay bestie, Kevin (a character from the new version of the comic strip), seduces a bi-curious Moose. Archie, when not working out shirtless, pursues a songwriting career. “Your songs,” a critical music professor sneers at him. “They’re juvenile. They’re repetitive.” That’s true of “Riverdale,” too, but the show clearly knows it and doesn’t care. Every time a plot feels corny or prurient or preachy, there’s an acknowledgment in the dialogue. It gets exhausting, like hanging out with someone who keeps saying, “God, I’m such a nightmare!”

It’s a shame, because on the surface the mashup makes perfect sense: the retro throuple of Archie, Veronica, and Betty—with their pointy bras and double entendres—share deep roots with the fifties-era fetishes that lit up David Lynch’s amygdala back when he launched “Twin Peaks,” in 1990. But that’s not enough for “Riverdale,” which is determined to provide hyperlinks to every teen drama of the past century. It pays homage to (and this is a non-comprehensive list): “Dawson’s Creek” (therapized psychobabble, glamorized sex with a MILF teacher);“Heathers” (mean girls, darkly comic funerals); “Gilmore Girls” (modern youths constantly name-checking old movies); “Lolita” (Miss Grundy in heart-shaped glasses); “Rebel Without a Cause” (leather jackets, a drive-in showing “Rebel Without a Cause”); “Wild Things” (teen girls framing people in bathing suits); “The O.C.,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” and “Gossip Girl” (couture-clad bitches with rich parents); “Veronica Mars” (teen-age detective Betty); and “Pretty in Pink” (Duckie-like best friend Jughead Jones—a character so emo that he also feels trimmed from the director’s cut of “Pump Up the Volume”). When Veronica, reconceived as the daughter of a Bernie Madoff-like con man, snarks at her mean-girl rival, Cheryl Blossom, “You may be a stock character from a nineties teen movie, but I’m not,” it feels not so much knowing as damning. The episodes bear the titles of such camp classics as “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” or of teen-centered dramas like “The Last Picture Show.” The parents are played by former teen stars, like the now grizzled Luke Perry (“90210”) and Mädchen Amick (“Twin Peaks”), not grizzled. Often, “Riverdale” feels less like a teen show than like a Pinterest page about the genre. The irony is, it may be more enjoyable if you don’t get the references.

There’s nothing wrong with pastiche or stylization, of course. Plenty of recent series have used these techniques wonderfully—or, at least, effectively. The sometimes self-serious but always beautiful “Mr. Robot” merged Occupy politics with films like “Fight Club” and “Taxi Driver.” “Legion” threw the “X-Men” comics into a blender with everything from Wes Anderson to David Bowie and Stanley Kubrick. The “American Horror Story” series is a bold, messy mélange of camp, glamour, and seventies horror films.

Last year’s supernatural eighties-pastiche, “Stranger Things,” was, structurally speaking, pretty similar to “Riverdale”: a fun kiddie thriller full of retro homages. But, while some critics faulted the series for its obsessive Spielberg echoes, “Stranger Things” had more going for it than that. It was well plotted and smartly paced, and featured a terrific performance by Millie Bobby Brown. It also made emotional sense. Along with the visual nods to Spielberg, it shared his deep fascination with the fragile bond between children and parents, the failed dream of suburban safety. It was a show about grief and abandonment; on those subjects, it was sincere.

In contrast, “Riverdale” has an elevator pitch where its heart ought to be, to repurpose “All About Eve” (which will probably happen in the next episode). That might work if the show were a truly rude circus, extravagant and playful, like the best of “Glee,” another influence. But, mimicking “Twin Peaks” (and probably Raymond Chandler, and maybe even “Blade Runner”), it’s weighed down by Jughead’s existential narration, which is full of phony musings about shame and guilt. “Hope, a word so close to home—and as tricky,” he broods in a typical passage. Mostly, he perseverates about how the American fantasy of small-town virtue is merely a mask for corruption. “This story is about a town, once wholesome and innocent, now forever changed by the mysterious murder of Jason Blossom on the Fourth of July,” he intones in each episode’s intro.

That’s a Lynchian theme, of course, one that plenty of moody adolescents have stumbled upon organically: the insight that everyone who looks happy is just faking it—and that sex is scary and kind of gross. But Lynch, whose reboot of “Twin Peaks” begins in May, on Showtime, comes by those anxieties honestly. The original “Twin Peaks” was surreal, with camp in the toolbox, but the creator’s disgust and desire are always genuine: his fingerprints turn every corrupt image (an ear covered in ants, a prom queen wrapped in plastic) sticky. Call me a sincerity fetishist, but “Riverdale,” for all its heavy breathing, appears to be going through the motions.

Does it seem as if I’m being too hard on a teen show on the CW? The problem might be that I have higher standards for teen shows than for many adult ones. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the première of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the show that made me a TV critic. That series, like “Riverdale,” was built on banter, using an idiosyncratic lingo invented by its creator, Joss Whedon. It mixed genres, among them horror, superhero comics, and teen romance—and, because it was stylized, it was often wrongly described as camp. But, like “Stranger Things,” it had a generous eye for its characters: for Buffy, the apocalypse was not a joke, and the demons she confronted were metaphors for the terrors of female adolescence—abandonment, sexual violence, mortality. “Buffy” was made from genres that adult snobs dismissed as juvenile, but it never played dumb. It was sexy—and, in later seasons, downright kinky—but rather than being prurient it was romantic, in more ways than one. Many imitators bit its style, but only a handful, like “Veronica Mars,” had its substance.

The two standout dramas of the nineties were also set in high schools, in a more realistic style: “My So-Called Life” and “Freaks and Geeks.” But it never made sense to describe them as “teen shows,” any more than “The Sopranos” was a middle-aged-dad show. To create them, the writers drew on their own memories, and some of the most outrageous plots were autobiographical. But the shows themselves weren’t nostalgic. They knew better. Their perspective was like that of Elizabeth Perkins’s character in “Big,” when she’s offered a chance to go back in time: “I’ve been there before. It’s hard enough the first time.”

Teen-agers aren’t dumb—and there’s nothing wrong with fantasies that are made for them, or about them, or both. Anyone over twenty knows that those years can feel more vivid than adult life. But there’s a difference between a truly clever teen show and one that’s all winks. As any cranky mom will tell you, keep making that face and it’ll stick that way. ♦