Supernatural ends its 15-year run having never gotten stale

The Ringer

"Certain shows just feel like they’ll be able to stay on the airwaves forever," says Miles Surrey of The CW drama starring Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki that ends its 15-season run tonight. "I won’t be all that surprised if the Survivor or Bachelor franchises outlive me—just keep plugging in new contestants and scenarios and tinker with the formula just so, and the viewers will keep coming back. Or look at Jeopardy!. While nobody will ever live up to the late Alex Trebek’s tenure at the helm, fans certainly won’t abandon their nightly dose of trivia once the show finds his replacement. I mean, there are already betting odds for who’s going to take over hosting duties. (Give it to Mina Kimes, cowards!) But unless we’re talking about a titanic soap opera like General Hospital, this feeling doesn’t usually translate to scripted dramas, which (typically, eventually) have expiration dates. That’s probably for the best: You don’t want your favorite series to end up like Dexter. Still, it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that Supernatural is finally ending this week. The series, which began on—millennial nostalgia alert—the WB, the now-defunct network that merged with UPN to become the CW, has somehow been chugging along for 15 (!) seasons. If Supernatural was an actual person, now would be a good time for it to start studying for the SATs. Supernatural has earned a place in the record books as the longest-running sci-fi series in the history of American broadcast television. Not bad for a show that started as a modest tale about two mopey, flannel-loving brothers saving people and hunting things across the United States in a vintage muscle car."

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• Recalling Supernatural's evolution from monster-of-the-week drama to psychological horror: "We set out to make a horror show, and those were the initial stories we wrote," creator Eric Kripke tells Variety. "But you learn and adjust as you start watching the film, and a few things conspired to tell us, ‘We have to focus a lot more on the characters than we’re currently doing,’ which is we realized the actors we had. We saw that they were just both wildly charismatic and emotional and were knocking everything we gave them out of the park. So we were like, ‘We should start giving them harder things to do because they can handle it.'”
• Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki said goodbye to Supernatural with a special dinner because they couldn't have a wrap party due to the pandemic
• Padalecki remembers being alone on set with Ackles after filming was done on the series: “It wasn't like, ‘Hey, look how awesome we are.’ It was like, ‘Hey, man, remember when we cried and we bled and we broke bones – literally?" he says. "Remember all the alarm clocks when the sun wasn’t up yet?’ However this turns out, however it's received, we gave it everything.”
• Misha Collins recalls his Supernatural entrance: We had squibs on my chest, and they were exploding, and I was supposed to not be fazed at all"
• How well does Supernatural's 2005 pilot hold up in 2020?
• The CW president Mark Pedowitz admits he "cried a lot" watching the series finale