Supernatural Kept Driving That Impala Long After Most Shows Would Have Run Out of Road
Nerdy Up North
The setup
Brothers Sam and Dean Winchester travel across America hunting monsters and investigating supernatural cases while searching for answers about their family. What begins as monster of the week horror gradually grows into a battle involving demons, angels, Heaven, Hell and the fate of the world.
Fifteen seasons is a ridiculous amount of television. Supernatural survives it because the actual premise is much simpler than all the angels, demons and apocalypses make it sound: it is about Sam and Dean Winchester refusing to give up on each other.
Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles have enough chemistry that you believe these two have spent their whole lives annoying each other in a car. Dean gets the louder lines and classic rock soundtrack, but both brothers are allowed to be heroic, selfish, broken and unbelievably stupid depending on the week.
The early monster of the week years are still some of my favourite material. There is something brilliant about the Impala rolling into another small town, somebody asking a suspicious question and the brothers pretending to be FBI agents for the hundredth time. The show can do creepy urban legends one week and then completely take the piss out of itself the next.
Once Castiel arrives, the mythology gets much bigger. Misha Collins gives the show another character who fits the strange Winchester family perfectly, and Crowley becomes one of those villains who is too entertaining to disappear for long.
The problem with going for fifteen seasons is obvious: stakes stop meaning much when everybody has died, returned, been possessed, visited Hell and probably punched God at some point. Some later arcs feel like bigger versions of things the show already did better earlier.
But there is a reason people stayed with it. You are not really watching to see whether the world survives again. You are watching because you have spent years in that car with these characters.
Positives
Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki carry the show, the early horror episodes are great fun, Castiel and Crowley expand the cast brilliantly and the series can switch between horror and comedy with confidence.
Negatives
Fifteen seasons means repetition, wildly changing quality and death eventually stops feeling particularly permanent.
Verdict
Supernatural absolutely went on long enough to become messy, but Sam, Dean and that Impala built the kind of loyalty most shows would kill for.
