It’s a fair question.
Supernatural launched on The WB, back in the final year that The WB was actually a thing that existed. The show’s creative pedigree? Well, it starred Tall Hunky Guy and Shorter Hunky Guy, with advertising focusing entirely on Tall and Short staring hunkily into the distance whilst furrowing their brows with enough determination to make Derek Zoolander wince.
Things didn’t get much better behind the camera. While pilot director Kim Manners was a veteran of some of the spookiest hours of The X-Files (including the still-shocking ‘Home’) Supernatural’s creator and head writer was Eric Kripke, whose biggest credits to that point were the screenplay to Boogeyman and the creation of The WB’s short-lived modern day re-imagination of Tarzan, wherein the ape-man battled crime in New York City.
(Fun Fact: I did not make that up.)
It was a show without a notable name anywhere in sight, airing on a third-rate network and trawling on the same material that shows like the aforementioned X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel had bled dry with their combined TWENTY-ONE seasons.
Supernatural looked like the easiest show in the world to write off.
Nope. Supernatural started its tenth season this Tuesday, and is due to cruise right by the 200 episode mark in just a few weeks. The show has gone through two networks, three showrunners, and a revolving door of ensemble cast members, yet somehow the show’s trademark black Chevy Impala keeps cruising down the dark backroads of lost American myth.
Let’s get some basics down before going any further:
Supernatural is the story of Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester. When Dean was a toddler and Sam just a baby, their house was visited by the Yellow-Eyed Demon. The Demon did….something…to the infant Sam and killed the boys’ mother. Army vet Dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) dealt with his grief by hitting the road with his sons, hunting out every hint of inhuman monstrosity and killing it dead, all the while schooling his boys on the lore of monsters and the art of hunting.
When we meet up with the boys in the pilot, Sam has quit the family business and is trying to live as close to a normal life as he can, while Dean has stayed the course and kept up the hunt. When Papa Winchester goes missing, Dean yanks Sam out of college and the two begin following in the old man’s footsteps, cutting a wide swath through every conceivable monster, be it vampires, werewolves, wendigos, and an endless array of angry ghosts and spirits.
For its first couple seasons, Supernatural kept the overarching mythology and arcs on the backburner. There were season-spanning stories and mysteries to be solved, but the structure of each episode was more akin to a procedural/anthology, with the Winchesters arriving in a different town each week to try and suss out what monster was killing who and how to stop it.
Many of these early episodes are clunky, with a few season one offerings being out-and-out wretched. But Supernatural immediately established an aesthetic that was unlike anything else on genre television at the time. It was pulp horror filtered through a blue collar lens, recalling the dirty, lived-in worlds of horror classics like Near Dark or John Carpenter’s The Thing.
And I do mean “horror” when I describe this show. This wasn’t like Buffy, which cross-pollinated Gothic horror with soap opera, superheroics and romance, or The X-Files, which was closer to science-fiction with horror overtones.
No, this was the good shit, uncut. The monsters and spirits which plagued the Winchesters did not fuck around. Flesh is sliced to ribbons, bodies mashed into wet splotches, while limbs and other sensitive areas were frequently torn from their homes and mangled beyond recognition. Even with TV budgets, Manners and the other directors crafted cinematic atmosphere, finding time within the pacing of network time constraints to let scenes play out, building tension tighter until it was time to smack the audience with the aforementioned sullied flesh.
But Supernatural’s greatest asset proved to be a quality that is still little-mentioned, even this deep into its life: the show is FUNNY. Hysterically so at times. A lot of that is rooted in the chemistry between Padalecki and Ackles, so perfectly cast as siblings that their give-and-take had the ease of a decades-long friendship right out the gate. The Winchesters are badass monster-killers, but they’re also brothers, brothers who drive each other nuts, call the other out, and have decades of petty feuds and grudges to bicker over during inopportune moments.
The writers fed off that energy and proved unafraid to go completely absurdist with some of their episode concepts, and both actors were willing to tackle moments with the old Bruce Campbell-ian abandon. Ackles in particular knows how to strike the perfect balance between iconic swagger and staggering dope, and the show has delighted in finding new and ridiculous ways to beat the living crap out of Dean Winchester for ten years now.
With the addition of Ben The Tick Edlund to the writing staff in season two, Supernatural’s embrace of the broad and absurd kicked into a whole other level. The show juggled horror and comedy with the best, dipping from slapstick (or splatstick) to chilling horror to piercing emotion, as the cost of the Winchesters’ never-ending battle with the forces of darkness really began to take a toll on both men.
If the show had maintained this trajectory, it probably could have lasted a few more seasons as an energetic little show, grinding out effective little horror yarns week in and week out.
But instead, Kripke began developing an epic multi-year arc, gradually revealing that the Winchesters were unknowingly embroiled in a cosmic battle for the future of the planet. The scope of the show grew to include a number of stand-out supporting players like Jim Beaver’s affable hunter Bobby Singer and Misha Collins as the mysterious Castiel.
There are problems in these middle seasons, primarily the writers’ struggle to tell a massive story arc on their regular budget. The show simply wasn’t equipped to tell stories on the scale that they were trying, and it left many of the middle-season episodes feeling like they were running in place, gesturing towards huge events without actually dramatically displaying them.
Also, and this has been a pervasive problem, the show just could not figure out how to write strong female characters. The show’s usage of women has been uncomfortable from the jump (with not one, but two different women being thrown right into the damn refrigerator in the pilot) and occasionally tips over into being truly appalling. Kripke and his writers kept attempting to create a strong female presence to counter the macho nature of the show, but they never figured it out.
Supernatural’s real problem ended up being that it just became too popular. When Kripke reached the end of his story, with an apocalyptic showdown to close out season five, it became apparent that The CW had no interest in parting with one of its only reliable performers. So the original climax to the Winchesters’ long war was hastily restructured, neutering some of the darkest punches and undoing the satisfying close for a more open-ended conclusion.
Trying to continue the series after its appointed end did not go so well at first. While I look on season six and seven with more fondness then many fans, it is impossible to argue that they were not massive step downs from the previous seasons. New showrunner Sera Gamble tried some interesting things with the structure and storytelling (season seven, in particular, feels like it pulled its Big Bad from a lost season of Angel) but it all felt off somehow.
Supernatural just didn’t feel like itself. The tonal balance was gone, resulting in episodes that were neither funny nor scary, but simply warbled between the two states for forty colossally unsatisfying minutes before thankfully ending. The Winchesters were barely even recognizable, reduced to sullen caricatures of themselves. In attempting to go deeper and darker with its arcs, Supernatural became little more than grating misery porn.
(It also, weirdly, became outright misogynistic in a way that is all the more baffling given that the head writer and showrunner was a woman. The female villains were always little more than sexually-aggressive models in low-cut outfits, snarling and cooing at the Winchesters in equal measures. Not helping things was the writers’ seeming inability to write dialogue for these episodes that didn’t involve Dean calling the threatening woman of the hour “bitch” or some variation thereof over and over again.)
By the end of season seven, Supernatural appeared to be little more than a ghost (natch) of itself, a show that had burned out all of its goodwill and energy. Ackles and Padalecki both seemed exhausted and bored, moving through their paces, while the supporting players rehashed the same gags and bits over and over again. For the first time since the darkest days in the first season, it felt like a chore to sit through the show.
But, in a turnaround that had seemed impossible, the Supernatural ship was righted. Longtime staff writer Jeremy Carver took over as head writer and the seasons under him have been a blast. Carver reenergized Sam and Dean with juicy arcs for both Padalecki and Ackles to play, and invigorated the show’s mythos with a number of additions to the canon. More importantly, the show re-discovered a sense of FUN. There’s an energy and pop to seasons eight and nine, and a sense that the writers and directors are once again having fun seeing what sort of ghoulish good times they can come up with.
There have been rough points throughout both seasons under Carver (especially in nine) but Supernatural is now operating at its most consistent and entertaining pitch since the glory days of season three and four.
And having written all that out, I still can’t tell you just what it is about Supernatural that has allowed it to survive and thrive for a decade. Television now, and especially network television now, exists in a state of almost constant flux, devouring dozens of new shows each year, and all the while the Winchesters continue on their merry way.
Maybe it’s the inherent smallness and insular nature of Supernatural that has allowed for this. It doesn’t grab headlines or blow up the zeitgeist in any real way, but instead quietly goes about its business with largely consistent quality.
Whatever collision of luck and skill led to this place, I’m content to kick back and enjoy the ride for as long as it can go. Television is in such a near-constant state of flux, it’s comforting to know that the Brothers Winchester are still puttering around in that Impala, the stereo blasting classic rock and the trunk clinking with its load of bullets and blades.
The world of Supernatural is bleak and filled with monsters, and there’s no finer place to be.