Supernatural: Finding Family in a Fictional TV Show
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| Supernatural poster for season 1 vs. poster for season 15 |
236 hours and is a long time. This is the number of hours you would have to devote to watch the show Supernatural. If you were a fan from the day it first premiered in 2005, you would have spent 15 years of your life devoted to these characters. I don’t have the honor of saying I watched Supernatural from the beginning – I was five when the show premiered, and it can be scary at times. But I can say that I have watched all 327 episodes of the show three times. That means that I have spent 708 hours following the adventures of two fictional brothers who fight monsters. When I do the math, I wonder why I chose to spend so much of my life invested in a fictional tv show.
Supernatural is an American television series
following the adventures of the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they travel
the country, fighting all of the evils the world presents to them. Sam and Dean
have battled monsters, been to hell, killed angels, prevented apocalypses, and
fought God himself. Supernatural is the longest running US science fiction show.
But despite the many years and wild journeys of the show, one thing has never
changed – the two main characters embody family at its core, and will fight until
the very end, protecting each other at all costs.
The show is on its final season, with only six episodes
left to air before the Winchester brothers fight their last monster. Recently,
as the show is coming to an end – and so is my time worrying if the brothers
will live through to the end – I have been trying to understand my commitment
to this show. The only thing I can come up with is this: My mom and I have
watched every single episode together, and while it’s a fun show about hunting
monsters, it’s also a show about loyalty.
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| My mom and me with Jared Padalecki (Sam Winchester) and Jensen Ackles (Dean Winchester) at the Supernatural convention in Pittsburgh. |
Throughout its time on the air, Supernatural has gained a faithful fanbase, and a fandom active and vocal as a community. A fandom is a
group of people who feel “empathy and camaraderie” with others who share a common
interest. Many fans invested in the show attend Supernatural conventions in order to meet
some of the actors from the show and to be surrounded by others who understand
their passion. In 2015, a survey found that 85% of people surveyed consider
themselves a fan of something. If you are a fan of something, you have a
passion for the subject. You invest time, and you connect with the story.
Kim Rhodes (you may know her as Zach and Cody’s mom from
the Disney show The Suite Life of Zach and Cody) has been a recurring
guest star on Supernatural since 2010. Though Rhodes is not a lead actor in Supernatural,
she says that when she began working on Supernatural, she “showed a
bunch of strangers the broken, fragile, cussing, awkward, overly energetic
creature that is [her] heart and they said ‘Yes!’ and quit being strangers.”
This acceptance and family Rhodes describes finding in Supernatural is
something that many identify with. It seems as if, in a tv show about fighting monsters,
many have found a sense of community and – though it may seem absurd – a home.
The season five finale of Supernatural encapsulates
the reason I am so invested in the show when the narrator says “up against
good, evil, angels, devils, and God himself, [Sam and Dean] made their own choice.
They chose family.”
The reason I watch Supernatural is
this: It’s a time when I can sit down with my mom, and we can watch a show
together. We don’t have to talk, but we share a connection through this show. In
the characters who we root for to save the day, we see an unbreakable loyalty.
Though we’re two different generations, and may not have many common interests,
we are still able to identify with the familial loyalty we see on the screen,
and emulate this loyalty in the time we spend watching this show together.
The season five finale of Supernatural encapsulates the reason I am so invested in the show when the narrator says “up against good, evil, angels, devils, and God himself, [Sam and Dean] made their own choice. They chose family.” The characters in Supernatural may not be real, but what is real is the connection this show has given me to my own family, and the connection that many find in a tv show about two brothers.
To learn more about Supernatural: https://supernatural.fandom.com/wiki/Supernatural_Wiki
To learn more about the impact Supernatural has on fans:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/32072999
https://variety.com/2016/tv/columns/understanding-fans-superpower-troika-1201743513/
I cannot say that I have watched this show before, but I know my dad absolutely loves it. I loved how you started your blog with a short, powerful sentence that both emphasized how much time it would take to finish the show and made readers curious about the meaning behind 236 hours. I enjoyed how you captured the humanity and warmth in your blog through explaining your reasoning behind watching the show-- family time-- and I know Zinsser would too. This personal reason is a good demonstration of reaching your audience by allowing them to remember a show or activity they love to do with their families.
ReplyDeleteI read more about this show through the links you included and discovered that the “faithful fanbase” you mentioned in your blog-- namely the female fanbase-- was so devoted to the show that writing fanfiction became increasingly popular. In the early stages of these fanfiction stories, female fans expressed their love interests for Sam or Dean--the two main characters. As the show developed and the fanbase broadened to a younger demographic, there was a shift from love interest to female fans expressing their wishes to be adopted by these two characters and battle the evil forces as a family. I think this is interesting because it demonstrates this show’s broad fanbase. I also learned that the success of this show is largely due to the fact that fans generate a lot of attention to Supernatural through the internet. Between August through October, there have been a recorded 80 million website mentions from entertainment fandoms from a study in 2016.