Throughout Supernatural’s 15-season run, producers tried their hand at not one but two spinoffs, with both earning a backdoor pilot despite neither working out in the end. It wasn't until after the flagship's conclusion that an offshoot happened, with prequel The Winchesters lasting for just one season. Many were convinced that spinoff attempt #2, Wayward Sisters, would be ordered to series, and it was heartbreaking when it didn’t happen. I’ve always wondered what could have been, and SPN’s executive producer provided some details that make me even more bummed it never existed.
The “Wayward Sisters” backdoor pilot aired during the 13th season of Supernatural back in January 2018, focusing on Jody (Kim Rhodes), Donna (Briana Buckmaster), Claire (Kathryn Newton), Alex (Katherine Ramdeen), as well as new characters Patience (Clark Backo) and Kaia (Yadira Guevara-Prip). Despite the intriguing concept and a core squad, The CW passed on moving forward with it. Now, seven long years later, showrunner Andrew Dabb has offered a window into what Wayward Sisters would have looked like, and I feel like mourning all over again. He told TV Insider
We wanted to focus on monsters. We wanted focus on kind of back to basics. And then the other thing that you’d have there, which you didn’t have on Supernatural as much — you did in bits and pieces — was the formation of this team, which I thought was really cool and a process we had started.
All fans really knew about Wayward Sisters around the episode's airing was that Jody and Donna were basically gonna be mentoring a young female group of hunters, with the beginning of Season 13 even setting up that backdoor pilot by introducing Patience and Kaia. It was hard to predict how different or similar to Supernatural the new show would have been, and learning all this years after the fact just makes it suck even worse.
Much more was in the theoretical pipeline for the spinoff, including digging deeper into one aspect of Supernatural in a different way:
Then we were going to get into alternate realities, which, at this point now, they’ve been done so many times. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to see another story with alternate realities ever again.’ But at that point in time, they were still new enough. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. We could do something with that.’ I mean, there’s a reason we had Chuck destroy all our alternate realities in the Supernatural season finale, because I’m like, ‘I think we’ve seen enough of that. I think we’ve definitely seen enough of that.'
Of course, it’s always hard to know if a project will perform well once fans have access, but Wayward Sisters boasted characters that audiences knew and loved, and the backdoor pilot also had a lot of action that likely spoke to what the tone would have been. To this day, I’m still sad that it never happened, though I also wonder how it would have fared at the time if The CW had given it a chance, especially compared to the prequel.
It doesn’t help that it sounds like there was a lot planned for it, and that Dabb is still feeling the hurt as well:
I really do wish Wayward Sisters would’ve gone forward. We spent a lot of time building up to it. Bob Berens, who really did the lion’s share of the work on it, did an amazing job. Those actors were amazing. It just didn’t work out for us. But I certainly think there were more stories to tell there.
Supernatural did eventually finish the story that would have been explored on Wayward Sisters, so at least that was wrapped up, but it only made fans want the show even more. It’s definitely not the first show to get a backdoor pilot and not move forward, and it won’t be the last. It just sucks that Wayward didn’t get the chance to shine.
Maybe a Wayward Sisters-like show could happen later down the line or a Supernatural revival, but for now, fans will have to imagine what could have been. At the very least, the backdoor pilot is streaming with a Netflix subscription, which is better than nothing.
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