Saying Goodbye to the Most Beloved Father in <em>Riverdale</em>

Generation X wasn’t supposed to have icons. Of course, we wound up with plenty of them anyway—Whitney Houston, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, Heath Ledger. A humbler one showed up on our television screens in 1990 in the form of Luke Perry, who rolled into the cast of the teen drama like a James Dean–haired thundercloud. With smoldering looks and a poetic soul, Perry’s character, Dylan McKay, became not only a sex symbol for Gen Xers, but also an early springboard for a new role. As Fred Andrews—the father of Archie, the red-headed protagonist of The CW’s far edgier teen drama —Perry took his and, with quiet virtuosity, flipped the script, becoming the wizened patriarch instead of the