8 Things We Learned About The ‘Riverdale’ Parents In Season 3

Riverdale Parents season 3
Madchen Amick as Alice Cooper and Skeet Ulrich as FP Jones in ‘Riverdale’ (Photo: Katie Yu © 2018 The CW Network, LLC)

There is so much going on in Riverdale that the Archie gang are only half the story. So Riverdale had a Television Critics Association panel with just the parents to talk about their end of the drama on the Archie Comics’ adaptation.

Season three will pick up with Hermione Lodge (Marisol Nichols) as mayor, Hal Cooper (Lochlyn Munro) in jail and more secret business for Hiram (Mark Consuelos) and Penelope Blossom (Nathalie Bolt). Here are eight things we learned from the Riverdale parents panel. Riverdale returns Wednesday, October 10, 2018 on The CW.

1. Fred (Luke Perry) will find out Archie (KJ Apa) worked for the mob.

“Well, clearly your proudest day as a parent,” Perry joked. “Your son is a made man. No. It’s definitely not my normal neck of the woods, so when I get that information, it will be interesting.”

2. Alice (Madchen Amick) is now free to date FP (Skeet Ulrich).

QUESTION: For any cast who want to answer and the producer. A couple questions. First, with Hal out of the picture, are Alice and FP free to explore their relationship?

“Her black hood is out of the way, so there might be exploring a few old habits,” Amick said.

Producer Sarah Schechter added, “I personally have been rooting for FP and Alice since the second Skeet walked onto the set. I think it feels sort of inevitable, like some sort of celestial event.”


3. Penelope Blossom’s business is booming.

“And only getting bigger,” Bolt said. “So, it started off as an entrepreneurship of providing company and companionship to the lonely men of Riverdale. And I feel like it’s time to expand.”

4. Sheriff Keller and Former Mayor McCoy will hook up.

“One thing we haven’t had on Riverdale yet, despite all the twists and turns, is we haven’t really had a wedding episode,” creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa said. “But one might be in the offing that involves a certain ex-mayor and a certain ex-sheriff.”

5. Hal is not out of the picture quite yet.

“I have about five hours before they realize that I pulled the covers over my pillow,” Munro joked. “I can honestly tell you when I read [episode] 21, I was a little devastated. Thank God for Roberto being there because he calmed me down, because I absolutely adore working with these people, and I thought that I was done on the show. And when Roberto talked to me, he never gives anything away. He always just says, ‘It’s not over. We’ve got some ideas.’

I now have embraced this character. I think it just adds so many layers for Hal, and there’s so many great things for me to explore as far as whatever my backstory is. How I was able to fool Alice for those many years, I mean, this is like really interesting for me. So, I’m really looking forward to coming back on and really exploring where I can go with Hal. So honestly, I’m just very fortunate to be part of this group.”

Schecter added, “Just because he’s a serial killer, he doesn’t stop being Betty’s dad.”

6. There may be an all parents episode.

“We would love to do a bizarre episode where we follow mostly the parents and the kids are just sort of on the fringes,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “It would be great. That’s one of the nice things about having a nice long season is you can do special episodes like that, and I think in season 3 we’re in a place where we can do that, and I think it would be a blast.”

7. There will be a flashback starring the teens as their parents.

“I think I can say that it’s Episode 4, and it’s an episode called ‘The Midnight Club,’ which is our take on sort of The Breakfast Club, obviously the Riverdale much darker version of that,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “Cammy [Mendes] will be playing a young Hermione. Cole [Sprouse] will be playing a young FP. KJ will be dying his hair brown and playing a young Fred Andrews. We are going to learn about a really, really dark secret in Riverdale that the parents have been keeping since they were in high school.”

Perry added “It’s going to be great to see because KJ is so good at imitating people, not just me, but everybody. I’m really looking forward to seeing him do me in that. Yeah, it will be fun.”

Amick said, “Lili [Reinhart] has been studying Shelly in Twin Peaks.”

8. Mayor Hermione’s platform revealed.

“The thing that I love about Hermione the most is because she’s such a dichotomy,” Nichols said. “I think she fully commits to either side that she’s doing. So I think, as mayor, she’s going to fully commit to using that power to sort of stand up to her second, better half over there and see how she can do that delicately without putting herself in danger. I also think, at the end of the day, she still loves this town. I mean, we were fortunate enough to meet her in season 1 sort of in the middle of her story while he was gone, and she got this opportunity to start over and be the kind of person that she always wanted to be. I still think she’s in there as well, and I think we’ll see both sides.”