The CW's Nancy Drew is a dull Riverdale wannabe with a fundamentally uninteresting mystery

Variety

"In a roundabout way, Twin Peaks may be the most influential show in today’s teen TV," says Daniel D'Addario. "It’s roundabout because it’s not actually Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s brilliant, flawed soap opera about trauma, Americana, and, ultimately, itself that’s doing the influencing. The CW’s Riverdale, loosely based on the Archie Comics series, cracked the code that what people wanted was a show that had Twin Peaks flavor — small-town quirk, winking awareness of its own outsizedness, affected nostalgia existing right next door to cynical contemporaneity — even if it wasn’t interested in, and couldn’t achieve, actual Lynch. In borrowing from Riverdale, the new CW series Nancy Drew is borrowing from this imaginary Twin Peaks. Like its network-mate, it is leveraging an intellectual property known for its squareness and pumping it with raunch and an overstated air of enigma. Which wouldn’t matter if it were interesting. But Nancy Drew isn’t just dull, it has the misfortune of following another dull show that is much like it."

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• Nancy Drew is so cheesy it works: "It’s impossible to watch Nancy Drew without drawing comparisons to Riverdale, only strengthened by the fact that it airs directly after the popular high school soap about characters from the Archie comics," says Jordan Julian. "Both shows are adapted from source material that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s. Both reimagine beloved, squeaky-clean teen protagonists as modern-day teenagers who have sex, talk back to their parents, and, oh, regularly commit felonies. They have in common a pulpy, neo-noir tone and possibly supernatural elements. The dialogue in Nancy Drew is similarly cheesy, and, at times, forced and unnatural for the sake of explaining unnecessarily complicated plot developments."
• There's a leap in quality between the pilot and the second episode that might make Nancy Drew a success for Netflix binge-watchers
• Somehow, fiction's original teenage girl detective has been brought back to TV in a way that feels primarily derivative
• Can Nancy Drew be more than endlessly recyclable intellectual property?