‘Riverdale’ Brings Broadway to the Small Screen With ‘Carrie: The Musical’

Two dark visions of American high school life will collide when the kids from “Riverdale,” CW’s teen drama based on the characters of Archie Comics, come together for a production of “Carrie: The Musical.”

The special episode, which airs Wednesday, continues the tradition of television shows dipping into the world of musical theater.

The show’s executive producer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, said he and the rest of the “Riverdale” team knew they wanted to make a musical episode since the show was first conceived. But they knew it had to reflect the themes and tone of the series.

“Because ‘Riverdale’ is a bit darker and is a little bit off-kilter and subversive, when we talked about doing a musical episode we talked about doing a darker, more genre musical,” he said.

The “Riverdale” team considered “Little Shop of Horrors” and recreating the real-life story of a high school production of “Sweeney Todd” in New Zealand, where students were injured by a prop razor.

They settled on the cult classic “Carrie: The Musical,” and as they worked the parallels between it and “Riverdale” became increasingly clear to them. “It felt as though the songwriters had written songs for the same set of characters,” Aguirre-Sacasa said.

And he would know. Aguirre-Sacasa co-wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film remake of “Carrie.”

The ties between “Carrie: The Musical” and “Riverdale” allowed the writers to advance the plot of the show. “We wanted it to function as a true musical, which is to say that the stories kept going through the songs,” said Aguirre-Sacasa.

The seven songs featured in the episode are performed by the characters during rehearsals and as they go about their daily lives. The roles they are cast in also become intertwined with the storyline. In a fit of pique, Betty says to Archie, “From where I’m standing, Veronica is just as much of a privileged, selfish, spiteful mean girl as the part she’s playing,” referring to Veronica’s role as Chris Hargensen, Carrie’s main antagonist.

The line between “Carrie: The Musical” and the world of “Riverdale” almost disappears altogether in shocking ways toward the end of the episode.

“Riverdale” is just the latest show to bring a bit of Broadway to the small screen. Here are five other musical episodes of otherwise nonmusical television shows.

In Season 6 of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Sunnydale’s residents begin singing instead of speaking. It turns out that Sweet, a powerful demon whose presence causes humans around him to act like they are part of a chorus line, has come to town. Buffy must defeat him as she struggles to reconnect with her job as a slayer after returning from the dead.

It took series creator Joss Whedon six months to write the music for “Once More, With Feeling,” and the cast underwent three months of vocal training to prepare. Hinton Battle, a three-time Tony Award winner, lent his Broadway credentials to the show by appearing as Sweet.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, the star of the series, was ambivalent about the experience. “I’m not a singer. I never have been, and I didn’t have a lot of time with the material. So my original intention was to have someone else do the singing,” she told Entertainment Weekly.

Gellar came around, and the episode earned an Emmy nomination in 2002 for outstanding musical direction.

The hospital staff at Sacred Heart needed to diagnose a patient who begins to hear everyone’s speech as song after losing consciousness in Season 6 of “Scrubs.” At first, they think she’s suffering from a psychological problem, only to find out she has a brain aneurysm.

Debra Fordham wrote the episode, with music written by Jan Stevens, Paul Perry, Doug Besterman and the writers of “Avenue Q,” Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez.

Although the series had included musical elements before, like the “West Side Story” parody in the episode “My Way or the Highway,” Bill Lawrence, the series creator, didn’t want to make a musical episode if it wasn’t going to fit into the show.

“We wouldn’t have done [a musical], except that our medical adviser on the show stumbled onto this case where somebody had an aneurysm and was hearing everything in music,” Lawrence told TV Guide. “Obviously, they weren’t hearing an entire Broadway musical with singing and dancing, but for us in the world of ‘Scrubs,’ that works.”

When the Greendale glee club suffers a collective mental breakdown after it is forced to stop performing copyrighted music in Season 3 of “Community,” the study group is enticed into taking its place for the school’s Christmas pageant. The performance is a complete disaster, and the glee club’s leader confesses to engineering the bus accident that killed a previous iteration of the group.

The main target of the acerbic satire in this episode is Fox’s “Glee,” which the show also criticized in Season 1 for rarely using original music. “Regional Holiday Music” features all original music by Ludwig Göransson, with lyrics by the show’s writers.

In an interview, series creator Dan Harmon said the writing team wasn’t sure the episode would work until deep into the writing process.

“At first it seemed like it was never going to work and then we kind of hit a final point the night before the table read where we finally kind of realized the whole John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing'/'Body Snatchers’ sort of angle to this,” he said.

The “Sunny” gang is confused when the quasi-literate Charlie announces he has written a musical in Season 4. They assume there is some sort of selfish motivation behind it, but Charlie insists he did it for fun. Enlisting his friends, he puts the show on and persuades his longtime crush, the Waitress, to attend. He promises that if she does, he won’t bother her again.

The musical, called “The Nightman Cometh,” is a thinly veiled autobiographical story about Charlie’s long-running infatuation with the Waitress and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Uncle Jack.

“The Nightman Cometh” did not stay confined to the small screen. In 2009, the team brought it to the stage for a seven-stop tour after a successful, somewhat impromptu show at a club in Los Angeles.

“The Troubadour posted that we were going to perform ‘The Nightman Cometh’ and it sold out in record time,” Charlie Day told Spin. “We realized that we had to do something good.”

In Season 7 of “Grey’s Anatomy,” a pregnant Callie Torres — played by Tony Award-winner Sara Ramirez — is seriously injured in a car accident and begins to hallucinate that everyone around her is singing. A debate between her friends and colleagues ensues about how to treat her.

Her deteriorating condition pushes the doctors to perform a high-risk procedure to save her life. Her baby is born prematurely but survives, and Callie eventually wakes up and accepts a marriage proposal from her girlfriend, Arizona, that preceded the crash.

Series creator Shonda Rhimes said she wanted to create a musical episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” since filming the show’s pilot, but it took several years to actually make it happen.

For the episode, Rhimes, executive producer Betsy Beers and director Tony Phelan chose songs that had played an important part in earlier episodes of the show. “It became about picking the most iconic ones, the ones that best suited our singers, and the ones that made the most sense,” Rhimes told TV Guide.