UPDATE: Jared Padalecki says he's "gutted" to learn about Jensen Ackles' Supernatural prequel
The Winchesters is being executive produced by Ackles and his wife, Danneel
TV News Jared Padalecki
Because 15 seasons simply wasn’t enough, Supernatural is officially getting a prequel series. This is per Variety, which reports that The CW has offered a script commitment to The Winchesters, a series that will center on the lives of the parents of dedicated monster hunters Sam and Dean, delving into all the details that somehow weren’t covered in the first 327 installments of the extraordinarily long-running show.
The series is being executive produced by Supernatural star Jensen Ackles and his wife (and occasional co-star), Danneel Ackles, through their Chaos Machine Productions banner. Jensen Ackles’ Dean will also feature on the series as its narrator, serving as the Old Sheldon to his parents’ various monster-battling antics. (“Bazinga!” no one, presumably, will cry as they impale a werewolf.) The series is being co-produced by Robbie Thompson, who wrote and produced a large chunk of the flagship series.
The Winchesters—which will focus on the early life and courtship of Winchester parents John and Mary, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Samantha Smith in the, uh, parent series—isn’t the first spin-off that’s been developed to continue the Supernatural legacy. TV ghost hunters the Ghostfacers got their own web show back in 2010, while Wayward Sisters, a series centered on Kim Rhodes’ character Sheriff Jody Mills, was developed a few years before the show’s finale, but ultimately passed on in 2018. Will The Winchesters be the spin-off to break the curse (one of, roughly, 8 million curses that happened on Supernatural every season)? Who’s going to get stuck playing young Jeffrey Dean Morgan? Will there be an in-universe explanation for why Dean is peeping on his parents in the past, or is this just a Wonder Years thing where we’re not supposed to question who the hell Daniel Stern is talking to? Will this show be yet another boon for the discography of Kansas? Only time, and a probably-still-fervent Supernatural fandom, will be able to answer these questions.
Update, 11:06 p.m., 6/24/21: An unexpected development has now cropped up in this story, as Ackles’ old co-star (and current CW Walker star), Jared Padalecki chimed in on Twitter to wish his old colleague luck on the show—and also to express that this is the first he’s hearing about it, and that he’s “bummed that Sam Winchester had no involvement whatsoever” in its development.
We’ll be honest: Our initial assumption is that this was a joke, since Ackles and Padalecki have always reportedly had a pretty good working relationship, and one would at least assume that The CW would inform one of its current stars/producers about these sorts of plans. When asked on social media, though, Padalecki point-blank denied that he was joking, adding that he was “gutted” about the development. (Which could also always be a joke—these wacky TV stars, with their fun comedy lies—but at the very least, it’s a thing he said on the record.)
Supernatural co-star Misha Collins also commented on the announcement, although the tone of his tweet seemed less obviously upset.
124 Comments
For the love of god let the show die already! I don’t care about Sam and Dean’s shitty dad.
What if — and just hear me out — he fights with a baseball bat and breaks the fourth wall with a glance at the camera? Huh? Huh?
That may legit be the one thing I’d watch this for.
You know Supernatural already made that joke, right?
You know Supernatural already made that joke, right?
It is canon that he had his own version of Lucille.
I’ll be honest, I stopped caring about the show around Season 9 or 10. I still consider Season 5 to be where the show should have ended. There were some great one-off episodes after that that would have been great as antagonists for a season like the Fairies or the Thule Society. But the show was more interested in killing off great characters and one Winchester keeping a Season-long secret that causes a temporary falling out when its revealed.
“one Winchester keeping a Season-long secret that causes a temporary falling out when its revealed.”To be fair, they used that trope right from the beginning. Always my least favourite Supernatural storyline, especially towards the end when it made less and less sense.
I’ll see you and raise you…15 seconds into the pilot. This fuckin’ show holds the record for me losing interest in it, and that record was 15 seconds. It was promoted to hell and back as “THE NEW X-FILES!” so I thought I’d give it a crack. Lo, the opening scene of the pilot is Interchangeable Brother A getting Interchangeable Brother B from uni, so he knocks on his brother’s dorm room and it opens.Cut to a slow pan-up shot starting at some random teenage fuckgirl’s feet, up her bare legs, panties, tight t-shirt, and up to her face where her moist lips a seductively open and she’s making fuck-me eyes at the Brother A and says “Can I help you?”And then I realised it was going to be that sort of show, and changed the channel and never looked back.
Honestly the best episodes of Supernatural are the ones where they don’t take themselves seriously. Like the one where a trickster god traps the Winchesters in tv commercials.Or the one where that same trickster traps Sam in a Groundhog Day loop where Dean keeps dying.
The unnecessary secret-keeping was the main reason I stopped watching the show. I intensely dislike it when I can see characters doing something that doesn’t make sense because that’s what the writers needed to make their plot work. It was also what drove me away from Grimm – all the “let’s keep so and so in the dark about all the supernatural stuff because….reasons” they were doing.
The whole “keep a secret from your friends/family/team, have it blow up in your face, have a falling out, get over it, say you learned a lesson, then repeat the whole process” is basically what killed my interest in all of the CW shows. I know its a pretty common trope, but these shows seemed to have it happen at least once a season.
Everything after Season 5 happened in Sam’s head while in Lucifer’s cage. That’s a hill I’m willing to die on because despite some really great individual episodes, they never really had a successful arc or any solid character development after that. And yes, the killing off of likable supporting characters was a very bad habit. Also, not letting the brothers grow up and or get girlfriends/wives, simply because that would have led to stories other than one brother betraying the other. Or one of the big three going dark. The Supernatural fandom, however, has always been good at putting on a show. So things are about to get interesting.
I still consider Season 5 to be where the show should have ended.I will NEVER agree to that because Mark Sheppard.
sorrywhatthefuckThis will be polarizing but SPN is the most successful show in CW history and had a HUGE cult fanbase. I’ll watch
Didn’t they also try a spinoff set in Chicago?
Honestly though, the backstory in Supernatural was more than sufficient, John has all the personality of a brick (just…a very driven brick. I liked the character in his limited role).
I do recall them trying to do a backdoor pilot in Season 8 about vampires in Chicago.
Honestly the way they ran through like 5 different tourist destinations to emphasize the ep was set in Chicago (after having the earlier one with Death that I’m fairly sure was *not*) was entertaining.
It wasn’t just vampires. There were five families of monsters.It was much more The Originals than Supernatural.
They tried 2 different spinoffs actually, neither one of them got picked up.
And yet they won’t give me the spinoff I want: an animated show about a younger Bobby and Rufus hunting monsters before the Winchester kids were born.
My man! I been asking for this for a while as well! This is the show the fans really want!!
Holy *crap* I am ready for those hijinks. Bonus points for bringing in Ellen.
They should have visited Windward Circle
yeah and that one looked awful. The one with Jody Mills looked great though and I was sad it never took place.
The fact that they did the Wayward Sisters backdoor at least two years two late after they did an episode with the girls going to College and they could have just done “Buffy in College” with the Wayward Sisters set in the Supernatural universe kinda tells you how incompetent some of the CW people are.
Yeah it was so stupid. Jody, Dona, Clare, Alex could have been a great show. Heck they could have brought back Chrissy chambers as well and add to that cast. What a missed opportunity!
John also can’t know about monsters/demons until Mary dies so is it just literally about them dating?If you’re going to do a John show, it would need to be about the kids growing up.
That or they have every episode end in memory loss by angel/concussion, take your pick!
There was a comic series (DC I think) on this subject, so the starting grounds are even there.
There are several rumored attempts at testing backdoor pilots. The Chicago Monster Mafia families, one with Sheriff Mills, and the one about the college werewolf girl that was filmed in the Found Footage style.
They tried to have a spinoff about monster gangsters in Chicago. It was dropped after overwhelmingly negative fan backlash to the backdoor pilot. Having also seen said backdoor pilot, said backlash was justified. The pilot was dreadful.I’m still disappointed Wayward Sisters wasn’t picked up. I liked the characters that were supposed to star in that.
So, I have only seen a few random episodes of Supernatural, but according to fans, their dad never actually found out their mom was a demon hunter until after she died, when he picked up the trade, which kinda puts a crimp in the whole premise of the show.
I watched the whole series, and that’s how I remember it too. The dad didn’t become a hunter until after his wife died.
It’s never confirmed whether John knew about Mary’s family’s hunting history prior to his death, though near the very end of the show there’s a reunion of sorts where it might’ve come up.It was later sort-of retconned that John’s family also had a hunting history. That might be the angle they’re going with.
Prior to HIS death? Yes, he knew. I want to say Mary’s father Samuel helped John learn the ropes and helped put him on the path. Prior to HER death though, no he had no idea.
Both of Mary’s parents were dead, killed by Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon that later killed Mary, before Mary and John were ever married. This is shown in the season 4 episode, “In The Beginning”, where Castiel takes Dean back in time to show him the origin of how Dean and Sam became a part of the plan for the apocalypse and the raising of Lucifer.Azazel killed Mary’s parents, and John, and then made a deal with her that he would bring John back to life, if she agreed to let him visit her house in 10 years (to infect one of her children with demon blood, but he doesn’t tell her that part). She specifically asked if he would also bring back her parents and he said no.Samuel is later resurrected in season 6 by Crowley, but that’s long after John was dead.In the show, it was the psychic, Missouri Moseley, who told John about the supernatural world and put him on the path to hunting. In fact, the very first sentence of his journal is “I went to Missouri and I learned the truth”, which Dean and Sam thought referenced the state, until the season one episode, Home, where they return to Lawrence to investigate a haunting in their old house. In that episode she tells them that their father visited her days after Mary’s death, and that she “showed him what was really out there in the dark”.
No Mary’s dad died. He came back to life season 6(because that’s what happens in Supernatural) but that was to hang around with adult Sam and Dean.
You’re mistaken.Mary’s father Samuel had very little interaction with John and didn’t teach him hunting.
Also, isn’t Samuel dead by then? When they flash back, you learn the demon she makes a deal with to save John has taken Samuel’s body and that he dies when the demon leaves. Unless they retconned that into Samuel surviving after I stopped watching.
Samuel returned to life in S6 and hunted with Sam and Dean for awhile, but he never interacted with John who was by then dead.
Samuel died 15 years before Mary.
They’re going to Mr and Mrs Smith it?
Yes, it is confirmed. In season 1, Dean and Sam learn through John’s journal that he visited a psychic named Missouri after Mary died. When they visit her, she reveals that she is the one who told him about the supernatural world. She “pulled back the curtain for him” and “showed him what was really out there in the dark”. He didn’t even know monsters and demons existed before Mary’s death.He didn’t know about his family connection because it was through his father, who disappeared when he was still a child. This is confirmed in season 8.
John’s family were Men of Letters, who are emphasized as being the exact opposite of Hunters and considering Hunters lesser-than. And it was definitely confirmed that John didnt know anything about Mary’s hunting before her death.
You’re right, although there is a bit where he finds out and then gets memorywiped so maybe every episode will end with a surprise concussion.
That would be genuinely hilarious— the last shot of every episode is a baseball bat / tire iron / what-have-you clonking him on the head and him collapsing like a cartoon character.
Negan getting a bat to the head? Sweet irony
Right?? Bonus points if the baseball bat is named Lucille.
“I can’t believe you hunt demon-*BONK*-hey honey, what’s for dinner?”
They should have gone with “Subnatural,” missed opportunity
Staring Ruby and the Leviathans.
Or, since it’s a prequel: Preternatural.
There we go.
Honey, there’s plenty of fan fiction going with the “sub” natural angle, if that’s your jam.
How about “Supernumerary”.
Ackles, oh Ackles, you’re talented enough to not have to do this. So don’t. Please.If you have a note from your doctor explaining how nobody in Hollywood will offer you any roles then okay I guess.
At this point Supernatural-adjacent shows will the last shows when traditional cable finally completely dies
Yes, because there have been so many of them already.
After the television wars of the 2020s, all shows are Supernatural.
These shows are on The CW, a broadcast network.
Which should be already dead! It really is supernatural.
Damn, that whole “Update” part is one helluva burn…
Most fans don’t want this particular focus for a spinoff.John Winchester and Mary Winchester née Campbell are very controversial characters within the fandom.It’s established in-universe that the two only fell in love because of the intervention of Heaven-directed Cupids. John was also neglectful/abusive to his children.Will the show build on these elements or retcon them away?
I would prefer a Wayward Sisters spinoff with Sheriff Jody Mills, and also for Sam & Dean to stay close in real life & know about each others’ projects, though not as close as some of the fan fiction has them
Yeah, the Wayward Sisters spinoff had the most potential.
I said this higher up but I’ll repeat,The fact didn’t just have the Wayward Sisters spin-off be like “Buffy in College” is just a giant dropped ball on all their parts.
I’m looking forward to when they have to make a convention appearance to continue cashing those sweet checks and it is AWKWARD.
Finding out via Twitter that Ackles is producing a Supernatural spinoff has got to suck for Padalecki, but on the other hand, I also would be entirely unsurprised that Ackles might have decided he’s spent plenty of time with Jared and wants to move on.Of course, it could easily be that various NDAs and contracts required the people involved with the production to not tell anyone about it, and since Padalecki wasn’t involved, they couldn’t tell him. Even so, people will usually communicate sub rosa, because, you know, old friends or whatever. On the other hand, maybe Padalecki leaks like a sieve and they couldn’t risk it, or maybe Ackles actually hates him. Or maybe he’s like, dude’s 40 and still getting into fistfights in bars, I think I can move on in my life.
If it is an issue of NDAs and contracts, then that’s even worse. Why wouldn’t Padalecki be involved?Why legally exclude him?
Because it’s not his project. His Supernatural contract is over.
Ackles’s contract was also over as well. Why not involve Padalecki in the project?
They’re not actually brothers.
Why would he be involved? When there’s a lot of money involved, there’s an incentive to exclude anybody you don’t need.
He’s working full-time on Walker, for one thing. It’s possible that whatever other executives or producers are involved didn’t see any reason to include him, for whatever reason: maybe they don’t like him, maybe they didn’t have any need for yet another producer, maybe they didn’t want to give him a vanity credit (since he’d be too busy with Walker to actually contribute), etc.A lot of people seem to have the assumption that Padalecki should have been involved or at least informed merely because he was a co-lead on Supernatural for 15 years, but that’s a fairly naive assumption about how Hollywood works. There’s always tons of behind-the-scenes stuff that the public is unaware of. That said, it would be kind of naive for the producers to not consider what the fandom would think about this kind of thing (they’re probably pissed off; even though there’s no practical reason for Padalecki to be involved with the project, the fans won’t see it that way) and at least take steps to avoid blowback. They could have contacted him and said, “Hey, so this project is happening, we’ll tell you about it but you need to sign an NDA, and when it gets announced, please tweet something positive about it.”
Padalecki should’ve been involved. Period.
Why? Question mark.
A 40 year old manchild who wastes hours of film (and set time for all parties involved) with “funny” outtakes when the camera isn’t on him, who’s a social media nightmare who sets his fans on harmless service workers unlucky enough to deal with him, and who once got arrested at his own bar? Who wouldn’t want to keep working with him?
How can you “waste” hours of digital film?And I wasn’t aware Padalecki was the only person doing outtakes. I’ve seen more outtakes from Collins than anyone else.
Interesting that you didn’t address the social media cult leader thing nor the bar self-own.
Yeah, that fandom is *not* one to screw with. They are serious.
Also, I’m only a casual fan and I somehow knew the Ackleses were working on a show set in the SPN universe, though not necessarily prequel, because Jensen had talked about it at cons. I guess it was the prequel element and his character being included that was a surprise to Jared.
I tapped out on Supernatural around 2009 but to annoy my wife during our frequent workday GIF exchanges I’ll occasionally inexplicably switch to using Supernatural GIFs exclusively for a couple of hours—usually that one of Dean dancing. Anyway to answer your question I have no opinion on this.
You guys.
My fave:
Back when they were the age their kids are now.
I may have to do that to my sister. She’s never watched it, so she would be extra baffled.
A fun fact I like to point out because not many people probably know this is Bruce Campbell was originally supposed to play John Winchester. Or at least the John when the boys were all grown up. Jeffery Dean Morgan was only supposed to play him in the flashbacks. But scheduling conflicts kept Bruce from accepting the part, and so Jeffery was upgraded to full time John.
“A fun fact I like to point out because not many people probably know this is Bruce Campbell was originally supposed to play John Winchester.”
That’s an interesting story, and it’s not true in the slightest.
They wanted him as an older John in the 300th episode, which was in the 14th season, which aired in 2019. He absolutely, positively, was not “originally supposed to play John Winchester”.
https://tvweb.com/supernatural-final-season-bruce-campbell-john-winchester/
Keep pointing out your made-up “fun fact” though.
There’s a dad who knows how to use a boom stick.
You’re right, although there is a bit where he finds out and then gets memory wiped so maybe every episode will end with a surprise concussion. https://www.protegent360.com/antivirus.html
I don’t understand how this can work as John didn’t know that Mary’s family were hunters as she put the life behind her when she married him. He didn’t even find out about the supernatural until after she died.
The second-to-last episode was a better ending than that season deserved.
Anything after that is just uninteresting.
That penultimate ep is the actual series finale in my mind.
I kind feel like that final episode only exists to stop anyone from expanding the story again. It is like how Harry Potter is basically over when Voldemort dies. But there is one more chapter that stresses nothing interesting happened to Harry again
No one there has any self-respect. Or some dignity
Classic Winchesters, always keeping secrets from each other. 😀
Sam and Dean Break Up, Season 16 Edition.
The series is being executive produced by Supernatural star Jensen Ackles and his wife (and occasional co-star), Danneel Ackles, through their Chaos Machine Productions banner. Jensen Ackles’ Dean will also feature on the series as its narrator, serving as the Old Sheldon to his parents’ various monster-battling antics.Wait…. I thought the first couple seasons of Supernatural made it clear that Sam & Dean’s dad only became a hunter AFTER a demon killed their mom…
Maybe it’s a show where Mary is hunting demons while John obliviously goes about his day? Please let it be that!
Supernatural lore is very messy in the later seasons. There’s flashbacks and time travel shenanigans that have the boys hunting with their parents and even grandparents on multiple occasions.
As I recall. In Season 4, Dean goes back in time and meets his mom. But he’s told by Castiel that he can’t actually change history and when he returns to the present, everything still happened the same way, even though he warned his mom about her death.In Season 6, Crowley brings Samuel back to life. In Season 8, Henry Winchester shows up, (but he never technically died as he’d warped to the future to escape a demon)In Season 12, Amara resurrects Mary, and there is a later episode John comes back for a day, but it is the result of some magical object granting a wish.
So, I stopped watching but still have the last 2 seasons recorded. Worth watching? Don’t remembered why I stopped, life happened? Remembered liking most of the shows. This news is a real slap for Jared
He also deleted a tweet directed at one of the EPs saying “Et tu Brute?” that apparently led many fans to discover Julius Caesar for the first time.
This update suggests a certain naivety about how producers interact with their networks. I can’t fathom why the CW would communicate with Padalecki on anything not related to his current show.
Bring back Crowley and have a Crowley/Rowena spin-off.
I haven’t watched this show in at least 10 years, but why the fuck would Ackles opt to be hated by every fan of the show by doing this? Just an idiotic move on its face, and I’m sure his spinoff will get dire ratings.Update: After poring over some fan reactions, it looks like the most popular take is actually that Jared should’ve handled this in private. Typical sycophants.
TBH, if it brings something new to the mythos, especially if it’s removed from the whole HEIRARCHY OF HEAVEN tedium, I could be swayed.I’d hope that the series can speed up its timeline and bring in a young Uncle Bobby- a proper prequel series needs a young John & Bobby murdering monsters and yelling at each other.
Who is playing a young JDM? Just use the guy himself and the magic of computers to de-age him
I know we still like drama but an update to the update would be that they’re all cool now.
Another update to this one:
One of the main reasons I stopped watching Supernatural (aside from the show clearly having nothing left to say as they weren’t willing to truly go in a new direction) is because of the toxic fan community, full of people who despised each other and wide swathes of the show itself. It takes a lot for them to be united – somehow, Jensen managed to do it! Few, if any fans care about a prequel show with John and Mary, a “love story” which was canonically forced by the angels, and two characters who were hate figures for many of the fans, for various reasons. There are so many paths that they could take with a spinoff which make more sense than this. I’m not surprised that Jensen would want to try to keep the franchise going for financial reasons, but I’m sorry that if Dean is going to live on, it will just be as a mouthpiece for his abusive father. The only interesting part of any of this was Jared’s lashouts on Twitter (I think there was also one toward a writer, which has been deleted). Just another reason to reminds viewers that “we’re a family” is more of a marketing tool than anything else…
This is payback for Padalecki not being able to find a way to make it “Walker, Texas Ranger(s)”
bit.ly/3h9fcIB
eh. best of luck. but I stopped paying attention to Supernatural during the 3rd season. nothing personal, life issues came up.
This is all part of Jensen Ackles carefully constructed plan, see Jared can’t know about the new show, or else the actor in him will gain consciousness, then he will start doing a much better job on Walker and pulling down better ratings than a half to a mil in the 18-37 age group. Ultimately it would lead to Walker lasting more than two seasons, whereas this way, as it stands, Walker will be cancelled right about when the second half of The Winchesters first season begins filming, and he can come over naturally. Otherwise he may not be available and stay on Walker for several years of just-passing-mediocrity non-ranger Texas-rangering, while he watches his female costar do all the kung fu and bad ass shit, and maintains an emo presence in the series while bouncing from one existential crisis to another.
Funny to see, the show did such a conspicuous job of promo-ing the two leads as buddies off the set. Still, have watched every episode of Supernatural and am a fan of both actors.Ackles has more range and far better comic chops, but I thought Padalecki actually did most of the heavy lifting selling the show’s goofy-yet-emotionally charged material, which there was a lot of.Anyway, the parents’ backstory arc was one of my least favorite extended storylines. It could have stayed all backstory and would have been fine, but as it progressed I found Mary in particular to be sort of a drab and pointless character. Not the elder Samuel though, Mitch Pileggi should be in every show. I will of course watch this new show, but I’m skeptical about how much I really need it. I loved having Supernatural in my life for so long, but was honestly just fine with how it ended.
I don’t have a problem with Mary as a character, and I can see 1970s era monster hunting being interesting to see. My issue is that I’m not quite sure I want to see John in the show because that would mean they’d have to keep the existence of monsters from his character for the entire run as he doesn’t ascend to monster killing glory to long after Mary is dead. I’d literally rather have this show set so far in the past Mary has yet to kill her first vampire or follow a new character whose fate we don’t know but who comes across younger versions of Mary, Samuel, Bobby, John etc on his adventures
Supernatural prequel? Sounds like potential for another crossover with a certain time-travel-based CW show…Although I guess in the Arrowverse, Supernatural is still a CW TV show…
Didn’t we already see how John and Mary got together in a time travel episode? One that made little sense?
My interest in any prequel is pretty low, and this just keeps sounding lamer and lamer to me. I could be wrong sure, and I did watch the whole run of Supernatural, including the bad shit. *shrug* I’ll take a wait and see approach.
🏳️🌈
Has Walker been renewed? It’s so fucking boring.