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Supernatural follows two brothers named Sam and Dean Winchester, who fight different monsters each week and then at the end of the season usually defeat one big bad super villain.
That is pretty much all there is to the entire series.
As a casual fan… who has seen every episode… I can safely say there never needed to be anything more, but the show created by Eric Kripke evolved over the years into something nobody really expected.
When Supernatural started, I was working at Roger’s Video and it was just another show about two guys fighting the baddies of the week.
Shows like this have come before and most of them usually didn’t last too long, as audiences got bored with the same formula being repeated over and over again.
15 seasons later, here we are. Sam and Dean will finally slay their last monsters, and video stores are mainly relics of a bygone era with only a few still standing.
Supernatural has always been a fun experience as a horror fan, because at the end of the day it introduces monstrous legends that most of us had never even heard of before.
The Winchesters have fought it all: demons, angels, monsters, strange time slots, multiple showrunners, and they even survived the Hollywood writers strike.
The fact that this show is coming to an end feels odd, to say the least.
During Supernatural’s time on TV, there have been 3 presidents, 3 Prime Ministers, 3 Spider-mans, 2 Batmans, and 6 Star Wars films.
There were good and bad moments during its time with us, but for the decade and a half it has been on, the good far outweighs the bad (and that’s a hill I am willing to die on).
Sam and Dean have literally fought every horror movie monster, which is a major feat as they pulled it off with charm and attitude, all while wearing pretty much the same clothes every episode.
Horror is a genre known for its tropes, and this show doubled down on every single one, in the most self-aware fun display of fan service ever imagined.
If you haven’t watched a single episode and you want to start today, there would be a mountain of content ahead to binge.
It would take over 13 days of consistent watching to finish the entire series. The episodes would vary from campy to downright slashers, offscreen deaths to straight-up buckets of blood.
The wild ride has been a fun one, but for outside spectators probably a complicated experience to understand. For example, God uses the pseudonym Chuck and that is somehow the least strange thing about the creator of Heaven and Earth appearing occasionally throughout the seasons.
For the long-time cast and crew of the show, the ending is beyond earned but must feel as surreal for them as it does for the diehard fans.
No trailer this summer for the next season? No reveal of a new Big Bad for us all to have a complicated love/hate relationship with? No wondering which characters from previous seasons might make a return?
Sure, there are other shows that follow a similar structure to Supernatural, but as the longest-running one performs its swan song, this feels truly bittersweet.
Supernatural, thanks for the memories and for making me a bigger horror fan, by expanding my scope of mythological monsters and biblical adversaries.
Thank you for making angels look like total badasses:
For making Lucifer hilarious:
Providing occasional fight scenes that felt mildly out of place, but completely warranted:
Thank you for any episode that involved Crowley and Rowena:
And last but not least, thank you for the closure of not ending it with an unexpected cancellation.
I, for one, eagerly await the inevitable Hollywood reboot that will most likely come within 10 years starring both Winchesters in cameo roles.
