Supernatural and the Difficulty of Endings

image from The CW

I’d love to frame the forthcoming thoughts as coming from a writer. And some days I actually believe I fit that label. But it’s more accurate to say that I am a story aficionado. I am particularly drawn to stories told visually, as I have this odd hindrance of not exactly being able to properly visualize things simply from reading about them. There’s just something about the multimedia conglomerate — storylines and camera angles and music cues that all come together in a swell of emotional resonance.

Storytelling in television is particularly fraught with peril, from the perspective of the creator. In a movie at least, you know that once you begin the story, you get to finish it. When you begin a story through a television show, you kind of get quality-checked by your audience and your producers all along the way. “What do women ages 18–35 think?” “Are we attracting enough 20-somethings?” “What are the chances we could get more than one season out of this?” So many aspects of the business of tv storytelling that, well, don’t actually involve storytelling.

Despite, or maybe because of, the uncertainty of television as a medium, I seem to have developed an abnormal obsession with endings. Maybe it’s because in the past I’ve invested a year or two into a show with a great premise, only to see it get abruptly cancelled — usually right in the middle…