Supernatural

Eric Kripke had been carrying the idea since a family road trip when he was nine, fed by John Bellairs's The House with a Clock in Its Walls and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. His first pitch was an anthology about a tabloid reporter chasing the paranormal, in the Kolchak mold, and it was rejected; the version The WB approved was a cross-country travelogue in the spirit of Route 66, which Kripke described as "Star Wars in truck-stop America." The project was greenlit in January 2005, and that February the network cast two faces its audience already knew: Jensen Ackles from Dawson's Creek and Smallville, and Jared Padalecki from Gilmore Girls. Kripke and the network deadlocked over which of the two should play Sam; Ackles chose Dean partly because the character was comedic and reckless.

Supernatural premiered on September 13, 2005. Sam and Dean Winchester, raised as hunters by a father tracking the creature that killed their mother, crossed the country in a black 1967 Chevrolet Impala with a weapons cache in the trunk, working folklore and urban legends one case at a time — the production treated the car as a third character. Kripke insisted on classic rock and threatened to quit if the network pushed contemporary bands; Kansas's "Carry On Wayward Son" became the unofficial theme, playing over the recap of every season finale from the second season on. When The WB and UPN merged into The CW in 2006, Supernatural was the only new WB program the new network kept.

Kripke had planned three seasons, stretched the story to five, and ended his arc — Dean's crossroads deal, Hell, the angel Castiel, the Apocalypse — with the fifth season. A spike in the ratings got the show renewed anyway, and it went on through four showrunner eras, renewed fourteen times in all. The audience was never large by broadcast standards (the pilot drew 5.69 million, the series high was 5.82 million for a first-season episode, and most episodes afterward held above one million) but it was loyal and loud. Fans sent postcards and wrote to critics when cancellation threatened, Padalecki named the community the SPNFamily, "family don't end with blood" became its motto, and more than 250 conventions ran between 2006 and 2020. On Tumblr the fandom became a third of SuperWhoLock, famous for hijacking unrelated posts with a GIF for everything.

The leads, not the network, decided to end it, announcing in March 2019 that the fifteenth season would be the last; the finale aired on November 19, 2020, after a pandemic delay, closing the longest-running series in CW history and the longest-running fantasy series on American television. Critics generally called the first five seasons the peak, and those early monster-of-the-week years, before the angels arrived, are the show the 2000s remember.