Canadian-born Lilly Singh, known as Superwoman on YouTube, has millions of dedicated fans worldwide.

Growing up in Canada in the mid-2000s, there was never quite a role model in Western popular culture who looked like me. As an 11-year-old, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything amiss with my pop idols, or that their portrayals of North American life were missing an important element of cultural relevance for me.

Thankfully, for the generation of South Asian women that follow mine, that’s no longer the case.

The power of social media and an unmet need for South Asian-focused entertainment and art has paved the way for a new roster of Canadian female role models. Enter Greater Toronto Area-bred superstars: YouTuber Lilly Singh, or “Superwoman”; artist Maria Qamar, also known by her Instagram handle “Hatecopy”; and New York Times bestselling poet Rupi Kaur. These women are seeing widespread success in the form of followers, subscribers, book deals, and film roles. With their ascension into celebrity status, along with the continued rise of A-listers like Priyanka Chopra and Mindy Kaling, who are making inroads in traditional mainstream media, I can’t help but feel that brown girls are taking over: their time is now.

These social media mavens didn’t have to rely on traditional paths to fame available to South Asians—finding a way to Bollywood or winning beauty pageants. “They’ve all gone more a route where they’re trading on some skills and really challenging people and creating intellectual conversation,” says Faiza Hirji, author of Dreaming in Canadian: South Asian Youth, Bollywood, and Belonging. The ease of social media changed everything for these women along with many of the popular artists of our time, giving them the opportunity to express, share, and perform in ways they never could before. As they were building their following, there was no need for agents or producers. The women were their own marketers, making their own opportunities.

For the South Asian woman, this is especially rebellious. They are expected to be quiet, conservative, and observant of traditional values. Many South Asian cultures also stifle discussion around these expectations, according to Hirji, even as there is an obvious appetite for conversation around identity. As Hirji explains, “It’s perhaps not surprising that they would be the ones to say, ‘Let me find a space where I can grapple with these issues because this is my life, not just entertainment.’”

Their initial rise can be attributed to the support of the South Asian community, which has a stronghold in Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. This is not a country of minorities who have just settled, Hirji says. This is a country of several generations of South Asians who see themselves as Canadian but are grappling with issues of identity.

Videos like “How to Be the Perfect Brown Person” and “Sh*t Punjabi Mothers Say”—a couple of Singh’s earlier offerings—resonated with young Indians, first in the GTA and then worldwide. Qamar’s illustrations bring to light the scheming, judgmental, “aunty” figures that are common in soap operas and hints of whom can be found in the older women we grew up with. Kaur’s poetry has general appeal but she has penned some pieces reflecting the familial repression and trauma of South Asian women.

All of these talented women have used their initial fanbase to catapult to new echelons of fame, and often publicly support each other. Now, Singh has more than 13 million subscribers on YouTube and has landed a role in an HBO film. Qamar is a published author and her art was featured in a Mindy Kaling TV show. Kaur just released her second book and has more than two million Instagram followers.

I sometimes worry that the triumph of the brown girl is just a phase. But I hope that if anything, their accomplishments will inspire others to follow in their paths and convince the leaders of mainstream entertainment that there is appetite and appeal for the South Asian woman beyond stereotypes. “Even if it ends up being a passing phase—and I don’t think it will…. Whatever they’ve done,” says Hirji, “they’ve done it on their own terms.”

IMAGE BY © HOME BOX OFFICE, INC.

My decision to watch Flavor Flav over Tony Soprano was, at the time, a no-brainer. On March 12, 2006, I had two television options: a viewing party of the first episode of the final, and sixth, season of HBO’s hit crime drama The Sopranos or a solo session with the first season ender of VH1’s Flavor of Love, a Bachelor-style reality show starring Public Enemy’s Flav and his big clock.

While I anxiously tuned in to see whether Flav would choose Hoopz or New York, it felt like the rest of the world was in New Jersey. That spring day in 2006 was the closest I came to an episode of The Sopranos, sitting out the show’s previous five seasons, ignoring its 111 Emmy nominations and glossing over its numerous accolades, including best-written television series of all time honours from the Writers Guild of America. But try as I might, I could never fully escape the show. It came up often in conversations, box sets caught my eye when there were still video stores to rent them from, and friends regularly shamed me for never having watched a single episode.

A few months ago, I finally caved. A woman can only live on the Jersey Shore surrounded by teen moms for so long. As my Facebook feed filled up with Donald Trump stories and the world started to resemble a bad reality show, I craved good writing and smart storytelling. Top chefs and models, once my escape from the outside world, couldn’t save me from a reality that looked like an episode of The Apprentice gone off the rails. I hit play on the first episode and never looked back. Tony had his ducks, Carmela had her priest, A.J. had his baby fat, and I had a new favourite show. I may have been tardy to the party, but it still felt wonderful.

The Sopranos was definitely great TV, but there was another reason I loved it: None of my friends or family were watching it. To find mentions of the show on social media or the internet I had to use search functions and other Google wizardry. There was no spoiler alert shaming, no front-page analysis, and no water cooler conversation—what old people did before Facebook. It felt like I was the only one watching a show, and for the first time in a very long time TV didn’t feel stressful.

Binge watching has turned television into a competitive sport. A marathon, but with, hopefully, less sweat. Now we’re not only judged by what we watch, but by how much we consume. How many episodes did you watch this weekend? How many in one sitting? Only one season, where’s your commitment to the cause?

Before binge watching became fashionable, being camped out on my couch all weekend in dirty Roots sweatpants and a stained Mudhoney shirt, eating chip dip with my finger, and watching Laguna Beach was just called lazy. Now I am shamed if I don’t forgo sleep for days to mainline the new season of House of Cards the minute it is released. Netflix and chill has become anything but, well, chill.

Watching The Sopranos alone I felt chill. There wasn’t a pressure to keep up so I watched at my own pace, often leaving the show for days at a time. Social media may make television feel like a communal experience, but it can also mean we spend more time watching Twitter than the actual program. I read Sopranos commentary, but I didn’t feel like I was cramming for an exam. Gone was that overwhelming morning-after need to impress my co-workers with analysis and behind-the-scenes facts.

With each new season of The Sopranos I felt more alive, even as the mob hits piled up. I returned to scenes and episodes, savouring them in a way that’s impossible with binge watching. At last count I watched the scenes where Tony strangles Ralphie and he and Christopher deal with the aftermath at least 12 times. I cried alone on my couch when Adriana was killed, wondered aloud to myself whether Ben Kingsley actually would have been right for Cleaver, and cringed along with my cat at the homophobia Vito experienced. The Sopranos was mine and mine alone. It was bliss.

When I finally got to the last episode I waited. This June marks the 10th anniversary of the finale so another day or two didn’t matter. “Not now Tony,” I would say setting my remote control on the coffee table. There was no build-up, no must-see TV moment. It didn’t bother me that I already knew how it ended and that some obsessed fans of the show can’t hear “Don’t Stop Believin” without feeling culturally short-changed. I loved the ending, but I haven’t talked to anyone about it. It is still all mine.

I have decided to get into The Wire next. I heard it’s good and it has that annoying guy from The Affair.

I should begin by stating that while I collected Archie Comics as a kid, I am not so imprisoned in my childhood as to receive any deviation from the original script as a personal affront. In fact, The CW’s Riverdale—a modern adaptation of the inter-generationally adored comic strip—is in such desperate need of some 21st-century reality that, as I binged all available episodes on Netflix, I became so empty of human emotion as to doubt if I’d ever had a childhood at all.

The overall quality of Riverdale, filmed in Vancouver, can be best conveyed through its shape-shifting setting. Almost every meal of every character is eaten at Pop Tate’s 24-hour diner, presumably making it Riverdale’s only restaurant; but, in episode seven, Veronica and her friends go clubbing, taking advantage of the anonymity needed for underage drinking, and swaying the night away on a sardined dance floor. Everyone of adult age seems to have gone to school together and then procreated at a similar time—their children are now all in the same grade—meaning the town’s generations progress in small, cohesive waves. Yet, during episode four, the Southside Serpents gang is introduced, leading the viewer to assume that Riverdale is not only large enough to support organized crime but is too large to be taken over by it entirely. Speaking of the law, Riverdale is a one-sheriff town, but that sheriff is totally fine with interrogating minors without parental or legal presence, much in the way of a rogue cop from Baltimore.

The borders of Riverdale are amorphous and highly adaptive, able to shift in order to suit the storyline. Because of this malleability, Riverdale functions as the physical embodiment of the most powerful political force of our time: nostalgia.

Critics state Riverdale echoes Pretty Little Liars and Teen Wolf—two shows I have admittedly never seen but am confident I can deduce the entirety of both plots from their respective titles. I, however, would argue that Riverdale is unique as it uses nostalgia for its sole source of fuel, having no need for sustained story, escalating tension, character development, or even actors who can deliver lines without sounding like a Speak & Spell. Despite this vapidity, Riverdale should not be cast aside as irrelevant. The series parallels our current cultural moment to a degree not televised since The Wire. While Netflix is suddenly brimming with millennial reboots (Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Fuller House) and with more on the way (X-Files), Riverdale speaks to the possible perils of this movement—where old ideas are favoured over new, stasis over progress, what once worked over what could.

You don’t need a literary scholar to tell you Archie Comics had a troubling history with whitewashing. The television revamp afforded the brand a second chance at diversification. But it’s easy to deduce that Riverdale opted to play it safe and keep Archie’s original demographic: the young and the white. Characters who mean nothing to the show’s storylines are cast with people of colour: Mayor McCoy, Reggie, Mr. Weatherbee, Pop Tate. This diversity quota only serves to bolster the status of the show’s caucasian protagonists as Riverdale’s central characters are forever-frozen in their whiteness. (There is a chance that Veronica’s mother may be Latin American or Spanish because of two throw-away mija references, but neither Veronica nor any other character makes mention of her possible non-white heritage.) And in the script, every actor—even Indigenous Samoan KJ Apa, who plays Archie, and Brazilian Camila Mendes, who plays Veronica—conforms to the show’s white-passing ideals. In Riverdale’s attempt to modernize, however, the show’s writers change the one character who—through the original creator’s own ignorance—represented a non-normative identity: asexuality. With the sound of locking lips with Betty Cooper, Jughead Jones joins the fold.

The show’s caucasian normativity may simply be a reflection of the setting; small-town America (or however big this town is) isn’t often thought of being a fruit medley. But that lack of diversity only makes questions like Veronica’s unspoken ethnicity even odder. And why doesn’t the show focus on a Black principal of a white school but instead spends spine-bending hours on the social struggles of Archie, television’s dullest character since the yule log? Betty Cooper can drug, handcuff, and water-torture a Black athlete, Chuck Clayton, in order to solicit a confession of slut-shaming, and the only fallout is Chuck’s expulsion from the football team—not a peep about segregation, Ferguson, or even the Geneva convention.

Riverdale desires to comment on contemporary issues while being simultaneously terrified of doing so. Here, we see the lure of nostalgia: to live in a time when identity wasn’t an ever-present, ever-crushing reality; when racial issues were limited to the margins and the marginalized; when polite society asked nothing more of us than to start sentences with, “I’m not racist, but…” before saying something that was, indeed, quite racist.

Nostalgia is built off false history. As historians repeatedly state, the past had an unending line of phobias that favoured the few at the cost of the many. Nostalgia now holds such sway, however, because millennials from Riverdalian demographics (of which I include myself ) may be the first generation who are able to statistically prove the past was better than the present; now, there are no jobs to work, homes to buy, exciting new flavours of soda to experience. But to be nostalgic is to pout in the well-worn throne of privilege, picking at the seams, while waxing wistfully about when all chairs were made this well.

Much like the after-school specials of old, Riverdale’s characters approach all problems with the same apocalyptic frenzy. Whether it’s solving the show’s central murder or getting into the school’s talent show, the dial of every character is cranked to 11. And since the plot cares about everything, it also cares about nothing. Which, to be fair, is a startlingly apt dramatization of a Facebook feed. But the upshot of this unceasing urgency is the writing becomes so incredibly bored with itself that, like a clicktivist, it abandons most ideas before its conclusion.

In turn, the show offers various threads that, as of writing, have been mentioned once and immediately abandoned. A complete list of these untied threads would last longer than the series. The following is only a highlight reel: Moose, a brawny varsity athlete, is queer and in the closet; his girlfriend, Midge, is alluded to but never seen. Chuck Clayton, the aforementioned recipient of Betty’s Guantanamo justice, is cut from the football team for slandering women; but his father, who is also the school coach, is revealed to have previously covered for his son’s transgressions though remains gainfully employed. And Jughead, who is homeless and living Harry Potter-style beneath a staircase in the high school, can somehow afford a MacBook Pro on which to type a novel that acts as the show’s narration—a novel which is able to exist outside the confines of time as it repeatedly predicts future (“On Tuesday, half-way through fifth period, the first arrest would be made.”). Also, how can the leader of the Southside Serpents still hold down a full-time job as a construction worker? And where the fuck did Archie’s dog, Vegas, go?

Rather than working against the show, however, these shortcomings all aid its thesis: none of it matters. It would be incorrect to call Riverdale self-indulgent because to do so would imply that Riverdale has a self to indulge. Much like nostalgia itself, when you put even the slightest weight upon the series’ internal logic, it collapses. How could Archie go the entire summer without seeing anyone except Ms. Grundy and Jughead? Who cares? You don’t need narrative when you have neon lights radiating across a blonde woman’s face.

Riverdale has a preternatural ability to disengage with the present moment, incessantly historicizing itself by casting its gaze from the future; for example, after the town’s drive-in is demolished, the audience is gifted the lines, “Maybe they’ll save it. All the pieces. Store it in the town hall attic and rebuild it in a hundred years. Wonder who the hell we were.” I, too, am wondering who the hell you are, Jughead. This show has made me wonder the same of myself. Nostalgia speaks to an idea of return, to times of simplicity: when teenagers were shot for mysterious and glamorous reasons, not for wearing a hoodie. But the problem with return is that doing so demands you turn your back on contemporary issues like race, gender, and (in the case of Pop Tate’s Diner) America’s diabetic death-drive. Riverdale’s creators have confused the rearview with the windshield, believing they’re hurtling forward instead of swerving haphazardly in reverse; it’s as if they actually believe their pilot could drive us toward a new, modern, high-definition understanding of ourselves. I’d like to see them try. Please—I mean it—try