Netflix's new cult series is by no means perfect, but it got one thing exactly right.

Just a head’s up, this post contains spoilers.

The gang from Archie Comic’s Riverdale High have been kicking around their small American town not ageing or graduating or noticing the ebb and flow of wave upon wave of feminism for decades.

The teens who populate the pages of the publication are blissfully unaware of big, frightening concepts like “patriarchy” and “slut-shaming”. The female leads, Betty and Veronica, spend their days squabbling over their gawky ginger-haired classmate, Archie.

But life for their 2017 Netflix alter-egos is drastically different, not least because their universe is now, stylistically, somewhere between The OC and Twin Peaks and Archie is now a 90210-esque heartthrob.

Listen to Laura Brodnik and Tiffany Dunk talk Riverdale on The Binge. Post continues…

For one thing, after an admittedly rocky start, good girl Betty (Lili Reinhart) and fallen socialite Veronica (Camila Mendes) are not the eternal ‘frenemies’ they once were.

Both characters are far more nuanced than their namesakes, and by the end of episode one the pair have already vowed never to let a boy come between them again.

Their relationship is solid. It’s supportive. And subverts a damaging trope that’s plagued women on-screen and off for aeons.

That said, Riverdale, which is now airing week-by-week, is by no means perfect — a story line glamorising a relationship between Archie and his music teacher totally misses the mark and forgets a little concept known as ‘statutory rape’ in the process — but there’s one thing the show has nailed.

In the third episode, ‘Body Double’, Veronica falls prey to Chuck, an archetypal high school jock, who starts a gross rumour about her “sticky maple” after an uneventful date.

As a selfie of the pair begins to circulate the corridors (it’s 2017, remember?), Betty’s bestie Kevin informs her the malicious gossiping is just “a Riverdale thing”.

“It’s a slut-shaming thing,” she corrects him.

Side-by-side our heroines confront Chuck in the boy’s locker room and inform him his misogynistic crap won’t cut it — not now, not ever.

Betty, who is editor of the school paper, then undertakes to take ruin him with a scathing front page expose.

As her investigation deepens, she quickly finds her new friend isn't Chuck's only falsified conquest.

Ethel (Shannon Purser aka cult figure 'Barb' from Stranger Things) bravely comes forward too, and reveals the football team has also been keeping a playbook rating the girls based on looks and sexual prowess. Gross, basically.

Even Cheryl, the school's villainous cheerleader and the girls' nemesis thus far, joins the fight, after a quick schooling on victim-blaming.

"When they're done with us, they shame us into silence," Veronica says, after Cheryl refers to her female peers as "sluts".

Her solidarity is cemented when her deceased brother is outed as part of the sexist ring.

A crude revenge plot involving wigs, a hot tub and some 'good girl gone bad' theatrics aside, the girls know they are more powerful united and, in the end, they win.

Veronica, Barb Ethel and countless others are awarded the justice they deserve.

Riverdale is at times annoyingly self-aware, it knows pep rallies chased by milkshakes at Pop's are no longer enough to sate smartphone-wielding teenagers on Saturday night — it also wants you to know that it knows.

But it's clever, it's watchable and — for the most part — it's message is bang on point.

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