20 Years Ago, An Institutional Fantasy Series Started And Ended An Era
Carry on, my wayward son.
There are few things worse than your favorite show getting canceled, and in the age of streaming, the lifespan of TV shows seems to be shorter and shorter. If a series isn’t immediately a hit, then a renewal is hard to come by. Even shows that are immediate hits, like Netflix’s Stranger Things, five seasons can take almost a decade to premiere.
But 20 years ago, one series became one of the last massively popular fantasy series to follow the old TV formula: 20+ episodes per season, one season per year, and a classic episode structure. 15 seasons later, while Netflix was trying shows like The Umbrella Academy and The Witcher, it was still chugging along with its massive fanbase.
The Winchester brothers conquered demons together for 15 seasons over 14 years.
Supernatural premiered in 2005 with a premise that seemed very familiar to viewers. Created by Eric Kripke, who would go on to create Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys and its following spinoffs, the series focused on the Winchester brothers: Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki). In their trusty 1967 Impala, they roam small-town America hunting down demons, ghosts, and other creatures from American folklore.
In the beginning, the series followed a strict monster-of-the-week semi-episodic series like previous series The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Each episode, the boys would encounter a new threat to conquer, but every season also had an overarching story that would be established in the premiere and resolved in a finale. In Season 1, that was the search for their father, John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
But the premiere of Supernatural was only the beginning. Kripke initially planned the series to have five seasons, but it was such a success that it kept getting renewed for more seasons. Even before then, the stakes had already been raised incredibly high, with the Winchesters encountering God and the Devil, accompanied by the angel Castiel (Misha Collins), who would soon become a series regular.
By the time the finale rolled around in 2019, Supernatural felt like a series from another era.
By the time the 15th and final season aired, Supernatural managed to do what barely any shows get the chance to do: overstay its welcome. At this point, it had been 14 years since the premiere, and the characters, tone, and setting had all grown and changed. But perhaps most importantly, the fandom had changed. Supernatural was one-third of the holy trinity of “SuperWhoLock,” the conglomeration of Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock fandoms. They epitomized the 2010s fandom experience, the golden age of fanfiction, gifsets on Tumblr, and so much shipping. In a nod to the fandom’s love of pairing Dean with Castiel (aka Destiel), they had the characters confess feelings for each other, but their love was ultimately doomed as Castiel was sent to the Empty, or, as the fandom called it derisively, “Super-Hell.”
But just the fact that Supernatural had the chance to take such a long time and build up to an unsatisfying finale is a credit to its old-school style of filmmaking. It’s been a long time since a live-action genre series reached 327 episodes without rebooting with a new cast, and it’s likely to be a long time before it happens again. Supernatural did more than just create a massively popular series: it was the last relic of a bygone era.
