Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Winchesters’ On The CW, A ‘Supernatural’ Prequel Where Dean And Sam’s Parents Fight Demons

Supernatural was on The CW for so long, that it actually predates The CW. When it started in 2005, it was on The WB, which merged the next year with UPN to become The CW. Fifteen years later, the show ended as one of the longest running scripted dramas ever and a massive and loyal fan base. While Jared Padalecki went on to make the new version of Walker, Jensen Ackles became an executive producer of a prequel series about Sam and Dean Winchester’s parents.

THE WINCHESTERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “New Orleans, March, 1972.” A man in a fedora and leather jacket walks through a dark graveyard. He goes into a crypt, draws a symbol in blood, but is attacked by something guarding the crypt.

The Gist: As we see a bus approaching the town of Lawrence, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) narrates that the story of how his mother and father met, which sounded like the standard way people met 50 years ago, didn’t exactly happen that way. John Winchester (Drake Rodger), coming back from Vietnam, has a note from his father, whom he didn’t know, with an address in town and a key. He returns to his family’s garage, where his mother Millie (Bianca Kajlich) wants to see him stop running after his father, who walked out on the two of them when John was young.

He literally runs into Mary Campbell (Meg Donnelly) outside a movie theater as he gets off the bus, but where they encounter each other next is outside the address on the note from John’s dad, with Mary beating the snot out of a man possessed by a demon. She sends the demon away with a tub of holy water and a quick exorcism. She came to this address because her father, also a demon hunter, was trying to find a demon-capturing artifact and disappeared.

They find a dusty room that was a meeting spot for an organization called Men of Letters; it turns out that John’s dad was a member. He wants to work with Mary and they can help each other figure out what happened to their fathers, but Mary tells him, “you don’t want this life. Keep the past in the past.”

But he comes to her the next morning with a report about a missing bookshop owner in Texas, Ada Monroe (Demetria McKinney). The two go to Lubbock to pursue the lead, and are helped by Latika Desai (Nida Khurshid), a librarian in Lawrence who is a hunter-in-training, and Carlos Cervantez (Jojo Fleites), who is super confident in his hunting abilities, but is more like a frenemy with Mary than anything else. Their hunt leads them to that same crypt in New Orleans, where a box that’s supposed to capture demons is hidden away.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Winchesters is a prequel to Supernatural, and the show has the same vibe as the long-running original, with lots of banter and some light moments between all of the darkness and demon hunting.

Our Take: Let’s start out with a complaint that might be more of a quibble than anything else: Despite the fact that the show takes place in 1972, it seems that every character in The Winchesters could exist in 2022 and not seem out of place. The clothes, the hair, even the way they all talk doesn’t give the viewer an impression that they’re looking at a period piece — even Carlos, with his long hair and hippie-ish clothes, wouldn’t look out of place now.

Perhaps that’s on purpose; the idea isn’t to look at The Winchesters as some sort of a time capsule of a bygone time; it’s about John and Mary falling for each other while hunting demons with Carlos, Latika and Ada. In a lot of ways, this show, created by Robbie Thompson, is going to be a whole lot like Supernatural, except with a new group of people helping this generation of Winchesters. Will there be allusions to what happened with Dean and Sam during the 15 years of the original series? Probably. But there doesn’t seem to be a ton of fan service in the first episode, just a lot of demon butt-kicking.

The chemistry between Rodger and Donnelly doesn’t seem very lovey-dovey right now, though the scene where they bump into each other outside that movie theater may indicate that there was an initial attraction between John and Mary. Right now, the it’s more of the two of them feeling each other out, and how the very experienced and skilled Mary and her friends will train the newbie in how to keep themselves safe.

Mary is dealing with the death of her cousin Maggie, a fellow hunter, at the hands of those demons, and John has some bad flashbacks from Vietnam. Neither issue seems like it’ll be explored in depth; this isn’t This Is Us, after all. But given how quickly the “Scooby gang” of this show has been established, The Winchesters is off to a decent, albeit familiar, start.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Dean Winchester writes his narration into a notebook, gets in his classic car and drives away, down a desolate road.

Sleeper Star: Bianca Kajlich, who plays John’s mechanic mother Millie, does a lot with her relatively brief scenes, but we’re just intrigued by the fact that she’s a mechanic all the way back in 1972.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Congrats on your first exorcism, Johnathan,” says Carlos. “Let’s celebrate by getting you some new clothes from this decade.” OK, so maybe that addresses the fact that John looks like he was lifted from modern times and dropped into the bell-bottom era.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Winchesters should satisfy Supernatural fans; the prequel has a similar vibe and similar action than the original. And if you didn’t follow the original show for 15 years, you should be able to watch the prequel without being lost.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.