The Winchesters: Pilot

October 12, 2022 3:17 AM - Season 1, Episode 1

John Winchester returns from Vietnam, and teams up with Mary Campbell to hunt monsters and find their missing fathers. (Supernatural prequel spin-off)

TV Line - The Winchesters EP Talks Premiere's Supernatural Easter Eggs, Dean's Whereabouts and the Show's Big Bad

posted by oh yeah! (6 comments total)

I will grimly don my clown shoes and watch this for the whole first season, but it was so - meh. The two other characters have more charisma and fun on screen, and I will be amused/outraged at how they manage to weave this into the original's sprawling canon.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:38 AM on October 12, 2022

Yeah, I expect I'll keep watching for as long as this lasts, but it's out of residual fannishness, not out of the new show's merits. And I'll forever wish we'd gotten the Wayward Sisters spinoff instead. But I couldn't let the pilot pass without a Fanfare post so we can all honk our clown noses together.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:37 AM on October 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'll be following this vicariously through your FanFare posts, because the idea of this show just doesn't appeal to me at all and seems like a real stretch of the canon. And ditto to the wish this had been Wayward Sisters instead.
posted by sardonyx at 9:31 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

We finally caught up with this. (Life has been complicated.) We saw the original Supernatural pilot a year or two back and it was really remarkable how that show hit the ground running. Sam and Dean were 100% themselves, the moment they arrived onscreen. This, by contrast, really suffered from pilot-itis. Stiff characters and exposition dumps all over the place. The actors seem fine but the dialogue lacked that Supernatural wit and despite all the continuity stuff (and an appearance by Jensen Ackles!) it didn't really feel connected to the original show. The tone was off.

I really hope they can calm down with the pansexual rocker guy. I mean, there's certainly nothing wrong with a pansexual rocker character, but when he was strutting around, beating up demons, dropping quips and tossing his luxurious hair while a cheesy ACDC song was blasting, it felt like there should be a caption that said, "Here's our breakout character! Meet your new crush, fans!"

I expect to keep watching, but even if it starts to gel I'm not gonna let myself get too attached. I saw a headline the other day that this show (and the Walker spinoff) haven't gotten orders to finish out their seasons. I don't know if that's a ratings thing, or a CW-going-down-in-flames thing.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:23 PM on November 11, 2022

I doubt anybody will check this thread, but we finished the second episode (the one with the tree witch on the commune) and we're close to bailing. As much as we wanted to love it, so far it just feels like a really trite, undercooked show. The quips don't land, the drama has no bite, the monsters aren't scary. I've honestly seen better fan films. The pansexual rocker guy is a fairly constant irritant while the other characters are pretty bland. I keep reminding myself that shows like Star Trek: TNG and Buffy had really iffy first seasons before they got great, but those shows at least showed glimmers of promise and so far this just feels really uninspired. My girlfriend is as much of a Supernatural fan as I am, but she's become really fed up with this series (she says it feels like a Goosebumps show or something) and it'll probably be a struggle to get her to sit still for even one more episode.

So, for those of you who've stuck it out... Does it get better? Is this one of those deals where three or four episodes in something snaps into place and it becomes worth watching, or does it stay at the level of these early episodes? I'd feel sad giving up on a Supernatural spin-off just two episodes into its run, but it kind of feels like we're wasting our time.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:27 PM on November 19, 2022

I don't think it got any better. I watched episodes 2 & 3, but 4 & 5 are sitting unwatched in my dvr still. Given that CW has not increased the episode order past the initial 13, and all the cancellations of so much of the rest of the schedule, I don't expect there to be a second season. I may get around to watching the remaining episodes eventually, at least to see Tom Welling's appearance. But I definitely consider it a waste of my time.
posted by oh yeah! at 4:25 AM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]