Supernatural is Just Natural, Baby

Emotional development, Supernatural-style.

We are living in a post-MTV world. Push up your glasses, spit out your dentures, yammer in edentulous glee that the old ways aren’t there and what ever happened to good old television, like the kind your parents watched that you’ve discovered through Netflix and Nick @ Nite, because in between the super serious scripted TV shows (Lost, House, ER) and ironically retarded reality TV shows (Flavor of Love, Big Brother, Tool Academy) has come a new genre of television I like to call…the super serious, ironically retarded scripted show. It’s a technical term obviously, but it is a quick cutting, overdramatic, one-liner-dropping, silly-premise-exploiting, faux-macho-cool slab of programming meat that sucks up blood on the CW or NBC, conning 13-year olds and man-children out of their time like they have nothing better to do (often, they do not). In 2009, one of these shows is the pinnacle of this nascent art form.

That show is Supernatural.

Supernatural is the craziest fucking dramatic show I’ve ever seen in my life. This is not hyperbole. As I was watching it, I could not believe that I was watching it; the leap of logic to believe that a rational human being with good intentions had created this show was so giant that I collapsed back on my couch under the stress and turned to my Big Gulp for salvation, in which I only found watered down orange soda and a profound feeling of despair. Then, I turned to the second episode on the disc Netflix had accidentally sent me. Without context (and there is a heaping garbage pile of context to be had), the show is a herky-jerky timeline of insane events, blowhard backstory, and over serious white guys. This show features two of the most serious white guys I’ve ever seen, transcending the sour faces of Angel (from Angel) and Jack (from Lost), becoming walking meat bags of grim looks and wooden emotion. “Sam…” One of them will hulk. “We’ve got to find the ghost dog before it digs up the Indian bones.” And how.

First episode of Season 2. There’s a recap, although it’s less a summary of the previous season than it is a whizzbang of ominous lines and flashy images – DRAMA! ACTION! EMOTION! – that doesn’t sacrifice concept for clarity; if you are watching this, you buy into it. The show is not trying to sell you on its coolness so much as it is clubbing you to death. You are Steve Nash, one of the smartest basketball players in the NBA, taking charge from LeBron James, a force of nature; you are overwhelmed, forced to say “yes” with no other option. Anyways, to spare you the dreariness of a minute live-blog of a fucking Supernatural episode, here are assorted notes I took:

• Ghost vomiting
• Get a voodoo doctor and have him lay some mojo on me!
• Making a joke about a woman falling into a coma
• Smoke monster from Lost
• Intense as shit

Perhaps, it is best summed up by the following picture. Context: Serious-Looking White Guy #1 is a ghost for some reason. This is not a glib summary: One moment he is in a hospital bed, the next moment is a ghost. If this seems bizarre to him, he doesn’t show it. He’s watching his brother (Serious-Looking White Guy #2) and his father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan playing Robert Downey Jr., only fat) argue about something and gets so frustrated at their obtuseness that in a burst of anger, he slaps a glass on a table. The glass flies across the room and breaks. For a moment, he has become solid again; for a moment, he was heard. His response?

Yes.

This, of course, is Supernatural. It melds pop culture and a fast pace with a complete lack of self-awareness; the characters are saying things just to say them. SLWG#1 isn’t being funny when he drops that Ghost reference; it’s just something he would normally say. In college, a kid on my floor would say, “Ghost that shit like Swayze!” every time he got the Ghost power-up in Super Mario Kart 64, and he was universally ridiculed by all the guys and girls in the room. In reality, this is just not something you say. In Supernatural, it is.

At one point in a later episode, a song starts playing. The lyrics have nothing to do with what’s going on, but it sounds like Journey. “This sounds like Journey!” I said to my friend, who at this point was barely aware of what was going on. I checked the lyrics online, and sure as could be, it was Journey. The song wasn’t picked because of what it means, how it sounds, or how it relates to the storyline; it was picked because it was Journey. And you’re supposed to cheer when you hear it. Every episode of Supernatural is a 40-minute vehicle for one sentiment: Hell yes.

I want you to watch this show. It provides the best hour of entertainment I’ve had watching any other modern TV show in recent memory: It’s more absurd than Lost, funnier (unintentionally so, but still) than The Office, has dreamier leads than Grey’s Anatomy, etc. I am trying to get y0u to say “Hell yes” as well. Do you need more convincing? Here then, is another final brilliant moment, in which a monster hunter is torturing a vampire when the Serious-Looking White Guys come in and ask what’s going on:

Well, of course.

Game, set, and match. Watch this show.