Supernatural will reach its 20th anniversary in September, just a couple of months before the five-year anniversary of the show’s series finale. Since the show is streaming with a Netflix subscription, fans can have easy access to all fifteen seasons as they continue to hope for a SPN revival. As the show approaches its big anniversary, Jensen Ackles opened up about one of the best aspects of Supernatural’s legacy, and I’m in my feels.
While I didn’t get into SPN until 2017 when the show was in the middle of its 12th season, I have seen firsthand what this whole legacy means to the appropriately named SPN Family. Ackles, who portrayed Dean Winchester on The CW drama for all fifteen seasons, spoke to Collider about the series, revealing that one of the “great things” Supernatural gave him has been hearing stories about how it resonated with fans and how people find “comfort” in it, no matter what the Winchester brothers and Team Free Will were dealing with:
I think the show, because of the subject matter that it dealt with — but also because of these two brothers who would never say die — gave not only an escape for people who are dealing with whatever they were dealing with, but it also gave them maybe a little inspiration. There's an old saying on set if things get a little too emotional or a little too intense, or whatever it might be, people used to say — I haven’t heard it anymore, but they used to say, ‘Hey, we’re making TV. We’re not curing cancer.’ I remember when it hit me, somebody said, ‘We may not be curing cancer, but we might be giving somebody a little inspiration to fight it.’
Personally, one of the reasons why I love television so much is because it’s an escape, and I love that Ackles knows fans see Supernatural that way. Even though there are a lot of dark moments on the show, it can also be funny and sweet, and that's something that a lot of people can focus on if they don’t want to deal with the real world. Ackles’ comments about what people say about Supernatural are getting me emotional, especially knowing that if not for the fans, there's no saying how long the show would have ran for. He said:
We were doing the show. Our heads were down. We weren’t going to premieres and red carpets and parties and doing all that kind of thing. We were working. And when you’re sitting on a set and you’re working around 80 crew members, they’re your only audience. They’re the only people that you’re getting a reaction from because the camera’s not giving you anything.
Supernatural ended its run at fifteen seasons and over 250 episodes, capping at 327. Not only is that rare today, but it’s also rare for a show on The CW. The network isn’t nearly as big as ABC, NBC, Fox, or CBS, but that didn’t stop people from still watching and keeping the show on the air.
This makes the stories from fans all the more special because they truly cared about the show and still care about the show after all this time, and I honestly feel like crying after hearing what it means to Ackles:
They would tell us their stories about how the show may have impacted them and how much they love it or how much they bonded over it…I’ve met generations of, ‘This is my grandmother and this is my mother, and we all sit down and watch it, and it brought us together.’ That was really when it dawned on me that we were doing something special.
Even though Supernatural’s attempts at a spinoff were mostly unsuccessful, the show will forever have a lasting legacy that will never go away. The bond between the actors and fans will also never go away. It's one of the most rewatchable shows ever, and the Winchester brothers will always be around. SPN will be there for fans old and new as a form of escape, and I am forever grateful to have this show.
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