I’m about to break any illusion you may have about me being cool by admitting that I was exactly the right age to have Supernatural devour my brain at the ripe old age of twelve and as such I’ve never known peace. And while I might’ve been five when the show first premiered, it was basically my age bracket’s Buffy. 

It, along with Doctor Who, M*A*S*H, and Once were central to my TV development brain for better or for worse. I had relegated it to the back of my brain, a thing to embarrassingly admit to friends as a “cringe” former interest of mine. But after rewatching some seasons and old favorite episodes due to… well the current state of everything where I need to pretend that evil is something you can, burn, decapitate, or exorcise, I decided to unpack that box again.

The Pitch: Brothers Sam and Dean Winchester bop around the continental United States saving people, hunting things (usually monsters, demons, rogue angels, and occasionally gods), in the “family business”.

Now, I don’t write about anything I don’t have affection for, what am I a college student? Not any more. So let’s really clear out those coolness illusions by admitting that I think the first season  is near perfect, and while I may have problems with later seasons I can usually find one or two eps in each season that I’m fond of. I love monster of the week shows, if you can’t tell by my everything, and for the most part that’s what Supernatural is. In the words of Skip Intro, Supernatural is a “spooky cop show” (though it is worth mentioning that our brothers may pose as FBI agents to get into places but they hold no love for authority, mortal or cosmic) I will admit it is structured like a cop show. An opening stinger of violence, our protags arrive, check the body, research the vics and possible solutions, think they solve it by the half hour mark only to experience a complication forcing them to change strategies and live (usually) to fight another day. 

Exceptions made by sprinkling in trying to solve the ever escalating Big Bad of every season and the occasional end of the world.

The great thing about monster/case of the week plots is that they make for great television, both in a pre and post streaming environment. Both due to those blessed pre-streaming 22 episode seasons (with only a brief hiccup in season 3 due to the 08 Writers Strike) and because the variety of those cases contained. Just huck on an episode and with some minor reorienting with the help of a “then” and “now” style recap at the beginning of each episode, you’ll have a good time. And with [checks notes] 15 seasons and over 300 episodes you have a lot to choose from. Like:

• Killing Nazi necromancers
• Any of  the ones where their lives are actually a book series in universe written by God
• The wild variations of ghosts including a variation of the Bloody Mary story
• The wild variety of vampire soap operas scattered throughout
• The time travel episode
• The TV parody episodes
• The ones with the clowns.

(All of which are real)

Case of the weeks are really only as good as the people solving them. And again, I’m very not cool but I’m also not the first to say I do love Sam and Dean Winchester and their collected found family who they only occasionally accidentally fashion into weapons against the things that go bump in the night. Or, more accurately, as anyone who knows me can attest, I really do love Dean Winchester, a character nearly perfectly concocted in a lab to drive teenage me positively insane. A flirtatious snark fest with a loyalty and protective streak as wide as Route 66 is long, good with kids, and contains just immense amounts of daddy issues, a sick leather jacket, and portrayed by Jensen Ackles who is not an unattractive man. Yeah, I was totally going to come out of my first introduction to this show in the eighth grade completely normal about him. 

Now, while I could write a separate dissertation on my many thoughts about Dean Winchester (which vary from blatant and shallow thirst to deep investigations into the implications of Dean’s childhood of abuse that functionally broke him), we’ll save those for another time. 

Supernatural has to handle the phenomenon that a lot of “secret world”/urban fantasy shows have where recurring characters have to either be in on the game, in this case aware of hunters or are hunters themselves, or become fundamentally changed by their experience that they end up in the life simply by knowing too much. Doctor Who in the episode “Journey’s End” contends with this by having the villain calling the collection of companions ready to die to save the Earth in the Doctor’s name, his “Children of Time”. In the case of Supernatural I’d like to propose “Children of the Hunt”, and much like Doctor Who, it rarely ends well for them. Famously, and not incorrectly, people have railed on the show for its near constant character death of women and characters of color,  yet our two leads have died and come back so many times it’s practically an in-universe gag. There are plenty of “Children of the Hunt” who mostly make it out okay, enough to try a backdoor pilot spinoff, but every time one of them joins the ranks they echo the same sentiment “after one adventure with the Winchesters, you can’t unsee it.” An absolutely wild stance to have after essentially having one of the worst days of your life. These characters are rarely the victims of the Crazy Shit of The Week and more often are either geeks with connections, cops who ended up on one too many of the same jobs, or kids rescued along the way. Is this great company to keep? No, but considering their alternatives, could be worse. (Fuck you John Winchester, ahem.) 

Another aspect of this is of course the fact that the Winchesters do not want this. They make these Children of the Hunt while screaming the whole time that no one should want this life. No one should get into this life if they have even a glimmer of better prospects. And while the Doylist explanation is of course that we wouldn’t have as much of a show if fan favorite one off characters didn’t become recurring (hell, we wouldn’t have gotten Castiel if Misha Collins hadn’t given the brightest eyes looking at Jensen in season 4 with the line we all have burned into our cranium as TV began the second most dramatic queerbait (but that’s another essay)), it does raise this Watsonian paradox. The life of the Hunter is not glamorous and mostly gets you killed in nasty ways, but someone has to do it, and the Winchesters are but two brothers and a 67 Chevy Impala that purrs like a dream and has too many shotguns in the trunk, so who takes care of the cases they can’t. Who specializes in specific monsters so the jack of all hunters have someone else to turn to? All this to say, that in the same way the Doctor cannot help their Children of Time, neither can the Winchesters and their Children of the Hunt.

When I call it “Thrift Store Television”, it’s… mostly a compliment. I love thrift stores, I think they’re fun. But they require patience that I don’t always have on any given day. You know there’s good stuff in there, you’ve seen it, but it’s gonna take some time to find. Occasionally you’ll spot something on the rack and think it might be worth taking a look at only to discover that it’s either more of a mess than you thought it was or it’s got a few more holes than is mendable. And sometimes you just don’t have the energy to troll through the racks. Sure, you might have a few stores you know usually hold more promise than others, but you can only go to them so many times before the selection gets stale. I can only rewatch “LARP and the Real Girl” so many times. (or the Pilot, or “No Exit”, or “Dead in the Water”, or “Fan Fiction”, I could go on).

At its best, Supernatural is a haunting Americana Gothic about bumps in the night, folklore, the horror of suburbia, and the open road. At its worse, it’s a melodramatic man pain soap opera where everyone involved needs to go the fuck to therapy. Frequently, those things are happening in the same episode. And I think we as a society need to stop pretending it was all bad.

That ending was bullshit though and I’d like to stop getting my news via sending Cas to Super Hell.