On Oct. 11, 2018, the fourteenth season of the hit dark fantasy television series “Supernatural” started. It will be airing on the CW network Thursday nights at 8 p.m. and will span for 20 episodes, making it a show for the 2018-19 season.
The first airing brought about 1.49 million viewers, a significant drop of 0.61 percent from season 13’s premiere, and marking it as the lowest viewed season start along with season eight and season 11.
However, the 13th episode of the new season will be the 300th episode of the entire series proper. Andrew Dabb and Robert Singer continue to be the showrunners of this season, marking it as the third one they’ve had this role for.
“Supernatural” first started back on Sept. 13, 2005 on the WB. Eric Kripke is the creator of the series with the producers being Warner Bros. Television in association with Wonderland Sound and Vision.
Over the years, the role of executive producer has been shuffled between several figures including Sera Gamble, Jeremy Carver and Adam Glass. One of the former executive producers and director Kim Manners, unfortunately, passed during the production of the fourth season due to lung cancer.
Kripke had originally planned for the show to run for three seasons, though he later expanded his vision of the main storyline to encompass five. Once the fifth season ended and the main story was finished, Kripke departed from the series as a showrunner.
The origins of the series, however, were somewhat different than what the final product turned out to be. Kripke’s original vision was that of an anthology before shifting to tabloid reporters driving across America in a van “fighting the demons in search of the truth.”
Unfortunately, the network wasn’t the biggest fan of the reporter idea and, in a last ditch effort, Kripke changed his idea to involve the main protagonists being brothers, a decision that wound up with approval.
When the pilot aired, it was estimated at 5.69 million viewers and the ratings for the first four episodes were favorable, leading to the WB picking it up for a full season and kicking the series into future stardom.
In 2015, “Supernatural” claimed the title of the longest running American live action fantasy TV series with its eleventh season.
The premise of the series is that two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, travel around the country in search of the supernatural in order to kill them. They were brought into this type of life by their father John Winchester, who went missing prior to the first episode of the series.
Their mother, the catalyst for the events at beginning of the series, died after the demon Azazel comes into the Winchester house on Sam’s six-month birthday and kills her and burns the home down.
This event led to John’s obsession with hunting down Azazel and finding a way to kill it along with leading him to educate his sons on the lifestyle of a hunter.
Sam, however, rejected this and went to Stanford University and got a girlfriend named Jessica, before Dean came and got him to go find John. However, upon the search failing and the brothers only disposing of a spirit, Sam returned back to University only to find Jessica pinned to the ceiling in the same way his mother had been.
She is promptly killed in front of him before the room is set ablaze, an incident that pushes Sam back into the life of hunting the paranormal in order to find the creature that has now killed two people that were close to him.
From there, several more characters were introduced to the cast and new story arcs are put into place. The mythology only grows as the series continues and, for what is known, the fourteenth season may not even be the end.
Erika Brandenburg
Arts and Entertainment Editor