Picture Archie Andrews all grown up. Imagine the amiable, athletic redhead who's eternally trapped between his beautiful blonde and brunette BFFs a few decades down the line. Did Louis C.K. immediately spring to mind? Probably not, but if you're a believer in alternate universes, there might just be one out there where the sardonic comedian played the iconic all-American comic book boy-next-door in a high-concept time-travel movie.... or one with portals. Portals are so hot right now.

At the end of the month, The CW will debut their wonderfully juicy teen drama Riverdale, which re-envisions the Archie mythos through the lens of a sexy small-town noir. Throwing murder into the mix is already a pretty big shakeup for Archie purists, but according to Riverdale Executive Producer and Chief Creative Officer of Archie Comics Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, things could have been a lot weirder.

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Image via The CW

During Riverdale's panel at the TCA press tour, Aguirre-Sacasa shared an anecdote that sounds alarmingly like a Jack Donaghy pitch session. Before he and fellow EP Jon Goldwater ended up taking Archie to The CW

So we go to the kickoff meeting, and he said, "I've been thinking about this, and I think you guys kind of need to do something a little more highconcept, a little bigger than just a comingofage show.”  And I said, "Great.  We're open to that."  He's like, "I want you to think about time travel."  And I was like, "What do you mean?"  He's like, "Archie traveling through time."  And I said, "Okay."

But the studio boss wasn't done. Don't like time-travel? He's got more high-concept ideas and a real doozy of a casting suggestion.

We sort of sat there. And we're like, "Okay." And he's like, "It seems like you don't like the time travel thing. I got another thing. Portals." And I'm like, "Portals?" "Portals are huge. This is a portal to another dimension." And we're just sitting there like gobsmacked. And this was the greatest one, which I think is actually a funny idea. He's like, "What if Louis C.K. is Archie?"

Nothing says "Archie Andrews" like scathing wit. In the end, the team decided that the high-concept route was "the exact opposite" of what they wanted to do and they settled on the coming-of-age neo-noir Riverdale, which the team describes as The O.C. meets Twin Peaks, which reductive, but not too far off.

Check out the revamped Archie when Riverdale premieres Thursday, January 26, at 9 p.m. on The CW.

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