Supernatural kicks off its final season as the defining show of The CW

The A.V. Club

"It’s never been the water-cooler series, generating heat for the network the way zeitgeist-penetrating shows like Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, or Riverdale," says Alex McLevy. "And it’s never been a ratings juggernaut, pulling down record numbers like its superhero programming has done in more recent years. But what it has done is endured. As the channel went through multiple revamps of its image, chasing various demos and genre trends while always keeping its overall focus on the young-adult market, Supernatural hung in there, year after year, cultivating a fiercely loyal fan base and—amazingly—hanging on to it, in a way few series have. Even Buffy The Vampire Slayer, whose fandom is nothing if not noteworthy for its ardor, had shed significant viewership by its final season, whereas the drops in Nielsen numbers experienced by Supernatural in the last couple seasons have more or less mirrored the across-the-board pattern of declining traditional TV viewership at large. Whether bringing in new viewers or hanging on to the old, Sam and Dean keep finding an audience. For proof of this, look no further than the official Supernatural conventions. The number of shows that can generate their own cons is small indeed, and usually restricted to cultural behemoths like The Walking Dead. But for more than a decade now, there’s been anywhere between a half-dozen and upwards of 20 (!) Supernatural conventions a year, all around the world, pulling in the devoted followers of this tale of two brothers fighting evil. And they are passionate."

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• Supernatural's 15th and final season won't be all that different from past seasons: “I don’t know that our approach this year has been that much more different than last year, other than we’re writing to an ending, rather than a cliffhanger,” executive producer Andrew Dabb tells Variety. “The temptation is that you’d go into a final season and just do straight serialization with every episode tying to the bigger, larger God plotline, and we do have a lot of episodes that do that, but it still needs to feel like a season of Supernatural. So there are a lot of standalone adventures — some are scary, some are funny. We wanted to keep that mix going because it’s a key part to the show overall.”
• TNT schedules a Halloween-themed Supernatural marathon