While Supernatural may have 15 seasons’ worth of lore to cover for viewers new to the series, the mysteries in the show, in comparison to others like Lost, make it feel grounded. This is exactly what showrunner Eric Kripke intended from the start, where, in an interview with The Futon Critic, he revealed how his mission with the series was to provide closure, saying:
Yeah, it’s a personal preference of mine, my own taste. I think “Lost” is a terrific show but personally my own taste isn’t to have endless mythology. Because the answers are never going to be satisfying at the end of the day, I promise you. It’s so hard to go season after season after season with a mystery and then provide an answer that’s going to be satisfying.
At the same time, while Kripke didn’t plan to make it a small, self-contained series, he also couldn’t have expected the show to be this long. Nonetheless, the grounded surrealism kept the fans coming back, which we can also see from his latest project, The Boys.
Eric Kripke Didn’t Originally Plan for Supernatural to Run 15 Seasons
Despite 15 years of paranormal investigating by the duo of Dean and Sam in Supernatural
The showrunner talked about this in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where he debunked the myth of the show being originally planned for 5 seasons, but also clarified that it wasn’t supposed to be this long. He also explained that just because they managed not to dip below the acceptable viewership line, they got the green light, saying:
Supernatural was not an expensive show to produce. Supernatural did just well enough that it just wasn’t in the red. And when we started, it was the network of Gossip Girl and 90210. We were the one Goth kid in the back of the class — but, by the time we left, the entire place was genre-nerd central. Now the market demand is to just make really expensive stuff — like (The Boys), Fallout and House of the Dragon.
While it did have its unique charm in the grand scheme of things, after a certain point in time in the later seasons, the show started to feel stretched and uneventful, with the interest of the fans starting to dwindle. Thus, that long run was both a blessing and a curse.
How The Boys Manages to Continue Kripke’s Grounded Surrealism
While his previous CW show was based on the paranormal and the fictional, the unique charm of Supernatural was that it managed to bring a grounded realism to all of this in a natural manner. This factor is also the reason why The Boys has been such a hit amongst the viewers in recent times.
The series takes the idea of superheroes as celebrities and grounds it in real-world reflections of politics, capitalism, control, and morality. And in a step away from comic book archetype, the main characters in this show are flawed and, in simple terms, f*cked up beyond repair.
And just like the Winchester brothers, the emotional backbone of The Boys remains family, loyalty, and moral dilemma. Therefore, while it borrows some of the best aspects of his previous series, Kripke is also scared that it might suffer a similar fate as Supernatural, which is yet to be seen. Here’s more information about The Boys.
Do you feel that The Boys takes the best parts of Supernatural? Tell us in the comments below.
Supernatural is available to stream on Netflix (US).
