In the autumn of his nearly 80-year endurance, Archie has a fresh mojo and a jacked-up bod.

"Archie got hot - he has abs now!" An actual line in the pilot episode of "Riverdale," which is my latest guilt-free pleasure (life being too short for self-condemnation, at least in the arena of television). Like "Gossip Girl" meets "Twin Peaks," as more than one critic has noted, the twisty noir spin on an old American comic is certainly that, but a meld of so much more: There's a dash of "Dawson's Creek," a smidgen of "Friday Night Lights," slivers of that '80s hangout classic film "Diner" and even a whiff of a long-ago "Peyton Place," TV's original prime-time soap.

Less aw-shucks than OMG, the Archie-Betty-Veronica-fest - already confirmed for another season on the CW and Netflix - is somehow also fun in the way it manages to combine sincerity with an enlivening meta-ness ("You may be a stock character from a '90s teen movie, but I'm not," a character slams at one point).

At least some of the stirrings of the new drama emerged from the time when the creator of the show, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, was a student at McGill University in Montreal, where he was known to sometimes dress like Archie.

A master's student in English literature, the budding scribe - son of Nicaragua's one-time ambassador to the United States - had long been obsessed with the Archie-verse.

During his time in Canada, though, Aguirre-Sacasa hiked his interests further by staging a play that took Archie and merged him with a ripped-from-the-headlines, real-life murder.

It was a big hit at McGill and, later, the Montreal Fringe Festival, but since the play alluded to Archie being gay, the playwright received a cease-and-desist letter from the company behind Archie Comics.

Career advice 101, darling? The disrupter sometimes becomes the custodian, as was the case when Aguirre-Sacasa was later recruited to develop a new Archie series that follows the gang as they weather a zombie apocalypse and, sometime later, was named chief creative officer for the entire brand.

In a case of The World Works in Mysterious Ways, Part 4056, the Archie-head found himself in Canada again recently - this time B.C., where his new TV reboot is shot.

"The archetypes of Archie are like a theatre troupe that just kind of fit themselves into any sort of situation," Aguirre-Sacasa likes to say. Enter the lurid, pulpy Riverdale, which has turned snooty Veronica into a Latina, among other bows to diversity, and also follows the time-honoured teen-serial tradition of "25 years old pretending to be teenagers, with a little murder mixed in," as one observer put it. Hey, what's not to like?

One thing I do like is the firehose of witty pop references that splash from the dialogue on "Riverdale." Having caught more than half the first season, there have been precocious shout-outs (on an almost "Gilmore Girls" scale) to everything from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "Blue Jasmine" to "Les Mis�rables" to "The Talented Mr. Ripley" to "Breakfast Club."

If nothing else, the show is a film-and-lit primer for some of the young viewers, considering that in the first few minutes alone some kid babbled something 'bout Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

"Please, God, no more Quentin Tarantino references," exclaimed one character in another scene, in an epic display of nonreference reference. In another scene - a case of inside-Mad Men baseball - a character casually refers to a girl who's put on a few pounds as "too Season 5 Betty Draper."

Another winner, courtesy of Veronica: "Can't we just liberate ourselves from the tired dichotomy of jock, artist? Can't we, in this post-James Franco world, be all things at once?"

OK and another favourite thing: The particularity of the red hair sported by Archie, as played by New Zealander KJ Apa.

It's a very red, adding to the comic-noir of it all. The actor tells Vulture he had to have his hair bleached and dyed once a fortnight to play the part.

Finally, consider this: though viewers have instantly taken to comparing some of the character arcs on "Riverdale" to other shows that came before - Blair and Serena on "Gossip Girl," say - every teen show that you've heard of actually borrowed from the archetypes of the Archie comics, to begin with.

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It's a house of mirrors. Take even Brenda and Kelly on the original "90210." They were channelling the blond/brunette frenemyship of Betty and Veronica who, after all, first emerged from a comic that coincided with a time that first used the term "teenager" - a unique phase of life that didn't really exist in a formal way until shortly before the Second World War. That is to say, Romeo and Juliet were not teenagers. Neither were Jane Austen's characters.

Nobody, really, was a "teenager" until Archie and friends came along in the 20th century. And, here we are, back again.