“Riverdale,” the new high school noir on CW, is a dark, weird reimagining of the Archie Comics franchise. Which raises the question: What was the non-weird version?

The comics I read as a kid were an unstuck-in-time palimpsest, in which kids with ’70s haircuts and ’50s lifestyles tooled around in Archie Andrews’s ’20s-era jalopy. Recently, the franchise has been redesigned and reconceived. In one series, an adult Archie dies. In another, he and the gang flee an outbreak of zombies, one of whom is his old pal Jughead Jones.

The steamy “Riverdale,” which begins Thursday, owes more to those newer iterations. (The showrunner, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, is the chief creative officer of Archie Comics.) It chucks the comics’ old clichés for a new pastiche, drawn from decades of moody teen dramas, that occasionally adds up to something new.

The familiar characters are back, as are landmarks like Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe. But it’s a dark, bitter milkshake that “Riverdale” concocts, built on the suspicion that any town this squeaky clean must be hiding decay, corruption and secrets.