Supernatural is a masterpiece: lets talk about it

It's September 2005. The Twilight series is just about to be released. Grey's Anatomy, The Office, and How I Met Your Mother are all in their infancy. YouTube has just launched, and MySpace is gaining rapid popularity online.

Another television show is about to launch its very first season, building a cult following and paving the way for fifteen seasons.

Supernatural.

Supernatural is an American television series created by Eric Kripke. The series follows brothers Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) as they travel through the United States hunting down evil or supernatural monsters and creatures. The show debuted on 13 September 2005 and went on to run for fifteen seasons, with its final episode airing on 19 November 2020.

I was sixteen years old in 2013 when my best friend, Sarah, first spoke to me about Supernatural. Of course, I had heard of the show; by that point, Season 8 was already airing. But I'd never really had the means to watch it, as my parents refused to pay for any kind of Foxtel. Up until then, Supernatural had also seemed like a "big kids'" show. But I was sixteen and felt ready to handle a series with slightly darker themes and two hot male protagonists.

Sarah and I were having a sleepover. Having run out of funny cat videos to watch on YouTube (yes, it was 2013, and that was peak humour back then), Sarah suggested putting on Supernatural. I was hesitant at first; I don't usually like to try new shows that I don't know much about. I prefer to re-watch my comfort shows over and over again. But Sarah insisted, exclaiming about how hot the characters were. I reluctantly agreed, and before long, we were seated in her childhood bedroom—her on her bed, and me on a makeshift mattress beside her—ready to watch Supernatural.

This moment was over ten years ago, yet I still remember it so vividly. I remember the taste of the Munchers we were chowing down on (off-brand M&Ms from Aldi).

The first episode starts with a flashback to when Dean was just a small child, and Sam was a baby. A title card reads, "Lawrence, Kansas, 22 years ago." Their mother, Mary, walks into Sam's nursery, only to see a strange man standing over his cot. Mary screams, alerting her husband John, who runs to the room only to find Mary pinned to the ceiling, blood seeping from her middle. Dean runs from the house with a baby Sam bundled in his arms as the entire roof lights up in flames. John manages to escape the home and grab his sons as the inferno burns brighter. The scene then cuts to Sam in the present day at college.

What a start to an episode! I feel as though I'm not doing it justice with my description. Seeing Mary pinned to the ceiling—her face strained in horror, her legs bent at awkward angles before she is engulfed in burning flames—was shocking. Right away, the show establishes that it won't pull any punches when it comes to horror.

Sam is sleeping beside his girlfriend when there's a bump in the night. Sam immediately gets up to investigate, only to find that it’s his estranged brother, Dean. Dean explains that their father, John, has gone missing during a "hunting" trip. Sam immediately understands the double meaning, with "hunting" implying that their father was hunting some sort of ghost, demon, or monster. Sam agrees to help Dean find their father but insists he needs to return to college afterwards. Sam makes it clear that he has left the hunting life behind and is happy with the life he has built at Stanford to become a lawyer.

As the brothers travel to search for their father, they become sidetracked when they encounter the ghostly "Woman in White"—the spirit of a woman who drowned her children before taking her own life. This vengeful spirit hunts and kills men who betray women, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake. The brothers manage to put the vengeful spirit to rest, but there is still no trace of their father.

After the weekend, Sam insists on returning to his college life, much to Dean’s disappointment. However, when Sam arrives home, he finds his girlfriend in the same horrific position his mother was in 22 years prior—pinned to the ceiling before being consumed by flames.

In another devastating display, Sam’s girlfriend Jessica is killed by the same creature that murdered his mother all those years ago. Jessica's death prompts Sam to abandon his friends and his life at Stanford, returning to hunt alongside Dean.

Without missing a beat, we clicked onto the next episode. We were desperate to know what happened after the pilot had us gripped. Was Sam really leaving college life behind? Was Jessica going to come back? Where was their father? It also didn’t hurt that Sam and Dean were incredibly cute, and we were immediately crushing on both of them.

The second episode jumps straight back into the action with a group of young guys camping when they hear noises outside their tent. I immediately recognised one of the actors as the late Cory Monteith, one of my favourites from Glee. Sadly, his character didn’t last long as the ominous creature outside the tent attacks their campsite.

Sam and Dean arrive to investigate, posing as park rangers to get a closer look at what has been attacking hikers and campers. They soon piece together that the creature is a Wendigo—a terrifying being that has been terrorising the woods for over seventy years, feeding on human flesh to survive. While tracking the creature, Dean is kidnapped and taken to its lair, but Sam manages to rescue him with a well-aimed flare gun.

By the end of the second episode, we were hooked. The dynamic between the two brothers—Dean, the gruff tough guy who listens to rock music and wears a leather jacket, and Sam, the sensitive one with a conscience for helping people—was the perfect recipe for us to crush on. The show also follows a road trip format, with each episode featuring the brothers driving their beloved black 1967 Chevy Impala across the American countryside, solving monstrous cases. From Colorado to Wisconsin to Ohio to Missouri, the vast American landscape absolutely fascinated us, two Aussie girls from Queensland.

We binge-watched eight episodes in one night and then squeezed in two more the next morning before my mum came to pick me up. We couldn’t get enough of it. I practically begged my mum to let me stay at Sarah’s just so we could keep watching without interruption, but I had to go.

Thankfully, a friend at school had the first seven seasons of the show on DVD box set and lent it to me—and that was it. I huddled up in my tiny childhood bedroom, hunched over my laptop, which sounded like a helicopter taking off every time I started it up, and binged seven straight seasons of Supernatural.

It was glorious.

There are so many things I love about the early seasons of Supernatural, but what strikes me most about the first season is just how 2005 it feels. From the brick-style mobile phones, the chunky laptop Sam lugged around, to the bootcut jeans with flannel shirts and the pop-culture references—it’s like a time capsule for the mid-2000s.

One of my favourite things about the show is the episodes fans dub the “monster-of-the-week.” These are the episodes where Sam and Dean solve the case of some gruesome creature, whether it’s a vengeful spirit, a ravenous vampire, a shifter, or an urban legend haunting small-town America. The episode usually kicks off with a mystery—a body discovered by an unsuspecting child, or someone killed in a horrific, supernatural way (often featuring their trademark ominous shot of a blood-splattered wall).

The brothers then read about these strange occurrences in the newspaper or see it on the news and decide the case seems a little too gruesome or strange to be normal—it must be some kind of monster. They drive their trusty Impala to the random small town where the strange deaths are occurring, posing as FBI agents, reporters, cleaners, or mechanics to get an inside look at whatever’s happening. They interview family members of the victims—usually, the victim has a gorgeous sister or friend, providing one of the brothers with a B-plot flirtation. They search for clues to determine what the creature could be and research how to kill it, which, if it’s a spirit, usually involves salting and burning the bones. The brothers manage to kill the creature just before it gets to Sam, Dean, or the beautiful side character one of them is flirting with.

Some people dislike these episodes, dismissing them as “filler” since they don’t necessarily drive the plot forward, but they’re my favourites. I think I love these episodes so much because they follow what I like to call the “Scooby-Doo Format,” a term I’ve coined for shows that feature a mystery-solving episode structure, where the characters track down clues to catch the bad guy before the big reveal. It’s almost comical that I refer to them this way, considering Supernatural would later go on to have a Scooby-Doo crossover episode.

Which brings me to another aspect of this show that makes it a masterpiece. Amidst the 'monster-of-the-week' filler episodes and the plot-driven ones, Supernatural likes to throw in some downright silly plot points and episodes. Allow me to elaborate.

One such example is from Season 6, Episode 15, "The French Mistake." In this episode, Sam and Dean are zapped from the Supernatural universe into our universe to escape a killer angel. They land in the middle of the filming of a scene from Supernatural and are utterly confused when the real director yells “CUT” and the window they’ve just smashed through turns out to be part of a movie set. Things get even weirder when the cast and crew refer to them as “Jensen Ackles” and “Jared Padalecki” instead of Sam and Dean—who, in this universe, are simply the names of the characters on a TV show.

Hilarity ensues as Sam and Dean try to blend in with this strange universe. They go home to the mansion Jared Padalecki shares with his wife, Genevieve, who played a demon on the show (which is how the two met in real life and eventually married).

Another example comes from Season 5, Episode 8, "Changing Channels." The brothers find themselves up against an extremely powerful trickster/archangel who plunges them into various TV shows and forces them to “play the roles” of whatever show he sends them to. They start off in Dr. Sexy MD—this universe’s cheeky imitation of Grey’s Anatomy (which happens to be Dean’s guilty pleasure). The trickster then zaps them into a Japanese-style game show called Nutcracker, where they must answer trivia about themselves or risk having their nuts cracked. My personal favourite moment is when the brothers are forced to act out a genital herpes commercial. This episode does a fantastic job of taking common TV tropes and inserting Sam and Dean into different genres, forcing them to “play the part.”

I could go on and on about everything I love about this show, but this article would end up thousands of words long. I absolutely adored Supernatural when I first watched it at fifteen. Now, at twenty-seven, while suffering from a particularly nasty bout of the flu, I decided to put the show on again to see how it holds up. I’m now up to Season 7, watching with my partner, who had never seen it before. We've been enjoying a few episodes each night.

If you've never seen Supernatural and you're looking for a binge-worthy show, I implore you to give it a try. And if you're reading this for nostalgic purposes, I encourage you to sit down for a fifteen-season re-watch. I don't think you'll regret it.