Supernatural Pain
Letters to a Hack:
Eric Kripke & the Lost Boys of Supernatural
This has been a long time coming.
This rant, for lack of a better word, is directed at Eric Kripke, the showrunner of the Warner Bros television show Supernatural, which is currently airing on the CW network.
It’s not meant to be anything other than what it is: an airing of a grievance I have with the way Kripke has run his show into the ground.
It’s not meant to be merely for throwing out insults, either, though I’ve pulled no punches.
It’s written rather in the hopes that Kripke will listen, and learn, that there’s always room for correcting mistakes, and always opportunities to turn things around. And failing that, that Warners Bros will fire the motherfucker and replace him with someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.
With that, we begin:
Who Is Eric Kripke, and Where Did He Come From?
Eric Kripke is a writer/producer for television, hired in 2004/5 by Warner Bros television to create and run a genre TV show for them.
The show, Supernatural, briefly, is about two brothers who travel the continental US [apparently defying the laws of space and time] in search of and destroying demons wherever they might be.
The show is a study in contradictions. On the one hand with a physical production team so excellent it’s almost unbelievable for television, and on the other hand quite possibly the worst creative team working in modern-day television.
Eric, you see, is the worst kind of Hollywood functionary: a smarmy hack, and a self- and fangirl-aggrandized asshole. (The latter birthing the former.)
In 2003, Eric Kripke was approached by Warner Bros Television to make a TV show about Tarzan or the Apes. Tarzan, as you may recall, is a century-old character in which so much story lies, that the creator was able to crank out FOUR DECADES of material before he finally laid down his pen and died.
Eric, on the other hand, was a TV writer whose merits as a TV writer were, up until that time, mostly make-believe.
Nevertheless, Warners called on Eric, and Eric called on his peanut brain, and created a “piece of crap called Tarzan.”
I wrote a 50-page story that ended. Then it got made and I had something in production and it was all my dreams come true. They said to me, "Let's do 12 more." I said, "Uh, wait! What's the story?"
Wait, what?
So, Tarzan was a hell ride in every way, and we only did eight before they wisely put us out of our misery. But I think Warner Bros. appreciated that I stood proudly on the deck of the Titanic with my violin and just played away. I never tried to dress as a woman and get off the boat… I just went right down with that ship.
-Creative Screenwriting Weekly 05/09/08 issue
I encourage you to read the whole jaw-dropping article. The idea that he set the ship on its course, and watched with detached interest as the ice-berg approached, never enters his mind.
I watched Tarzan when it aired. Every single episode. It was, and still is, inexplicable in its shittiness. If Eric knew this, why on earth wouldn’t he do something about it?
But, Tarzan was soon in the past.
Fast forward two years. Warners approaches Eric with a new show they want to make.
Why go back to the worthless writer who couldn’t deliver modern take out of a wealth of material? Why, that’s Hollywood, of course!
Sit down, hold on to your crash helmet, we’re going in.
Approached for a new show, Eric wanted to do, and I quote him here, “a sub-par rip-off of Night Stalker.” Wisely, Warners said no. So, bullshitting his way through the meeting in the best tradition of hacks in Hollywood, Eric finally blurted out something the execs could envision. They latched on to the idea of a show about two brothers investigating the paranormal.
The then-existing WB network (a very smart, albeit not my cup’a, creation of Warner TV’s parent company, Warner Bros Studios) ate up the idea.
Now came the what-the-fuck.
Eric turned in the pilot draft.
I cared so much about every little detail and filling every hole that it ended up being way too much exposition.
Nothing’s changed, Eric.
It didn't have the same kind of loose freewheeling sense of humor the series ended up having. It was very, very serious. I must have spent three months writing it, turned it in, and the studio threw it out. They said, "We're not crazy about it." I heard, "We're wiping our butt with it." I said, "Let me find a way to simplify the back story." So, [producer Peter Johnson and I] said, "What if the boys grew up with Dad so they don't need any of this stuff explained to them?" All of a sudden, a two-page exposition scene just becomes a couplet of dialogue.
How about this, Eric. How ‘bout you google - no need to even go spend the money on books you should already have - how about you google “how to write a screenplay” and see the first piece of instruction that comes up. “Don’t write exposition!” It’s understanding basic to monkeys with typewriters, how much more showrunners making $30,000 a week.
Eric turned in a second draft.
Warners said: Ya can’t kill the dad.
"Please keep the father alive. It provides a place for them to go and a certain amount of hope for the boys. It's not so nihilistic."
I’ll do you one even better: It hits the primal. It transcends the need for words and explanations. What men do because of their fathers is timeless, something even Neanderthals could grasp.
But it took Eric a thunk on the head to get it. So he thought, But someone had to die. The studio and network were giving me all these notes about Sam's girlfriend, [Jessica, played by Adrianne Palicki], who survived originally. Can she make phone calls with the boys? How's their relationship going to develop? Are they meant for each other?
Good! We’ve got something here! Lots to work with, things to build up and break, emotions to disappoint, twists and turns.. Great, great!
I was horrified by the idea of telling a relationship b-story while you're trying to avert Armageddon in the A-story, so I went back to them and said, "Good news! I've figured out exactly how we're going to develop the girlfriend's story." They said, "How?" I said, "I'm going to burst her into flames on the ceiling."
The execs at Warners: *headdesk*
We fast forward again.
Supernatural Is On The Air
Some of you might not know who Kim Manners is. But I will tell you right now, that quite possibly the only reason the show wasn’t cancelled somewhere around season two, was that it didn’t have the production values of Highlander The Series.
And for that you can thank Kim Manners. Manners is what made the X-Files the X-Files. Not by himself of course, but his visual style, his ability to make a My Little Pony tea party seem like the most menacing thing you’ll ever attend, and the most innocuous of suburban streets look like something out of Lovecraft, (sadly, you don’t get a lot of this on his current show), is what made Kim Manners a one of a kind.
The gods of fortune gave Eric Kim Manners.
What does Eric do with it? Hear it from Kim Manners himself:
“We had a script this year that I directed myself, and Jared and Jensen didn’t particularly care for. And we talked to Eric and Bob [Singer] about it, and we had a long discussion and we made the determination that we would have to work that much harder to make it work. And we did.”
This is Manners having manners. If you read the missing lines, what he’s trying to tell you is that Eric, sitting in a room in L.A. while the crew is on set in Vancouver, didn’t see what the problem was with the script.
When actors don’t “care for” a script, there’s literally nothing there. When you have a “long discussion” with the showrunner and nothing changes, you’re up a creek. And when you still have to “work that much harder” to have something you can put on the air, waylay your so-called showrunner and beat his head in.
What, precisely, is a showrunner doing in Los Angeles while his crew is working 4am to god-knows-when in a different city? This isn’t Law & Order Spin-off Thirteen. This is your baby, the only thing you’ve got going for you from here until who knows. There are no guarantees for what’s next.
The actors know this.
But Eric had a different path in mind for himself.
A Deer In Headlights. At First.
The first time I saw Eric Kripke was on behind-the-scenes footage on the season one DVDs of Supernatural. He looked like a deer in headlights.
Not having been mentally quite present when the execs (now gone, if I’m reading things correctly) at Warners were telling him how to make a real show, Eric seemed quite unprepared by the white-hot cult success of his show with the pulsating mass of fangirls.
While the DVD footage was being filmed, which would be while the first season was being aired, he appeared still a desperate, harmless, writer/producer hoping for a hit. His plaintive outreach to the fans was interesting to watch, fear winking in his eyes like beacons of SOS.
But he was, dare I say endearing, and stirred hope in my thoughts, that with so many wonderful elements operating on his show, he might have inadvertently given us one of the most gripping genre shows on television.
But. Season three rolled around, maybe even as early as season two, and Eric had discovered online fans/fandom, and, stupidly, had taken it all to heart.
Turn Off Your Fucking Headlights, I Am Now “a God”
It took me a little while to catch on. But, fascinated, I watched as the show began to go from “There’s an idea here...” to “Why has this show suddenly become so…?”
The word is obnoxious.
Eric suddenly, or gradually, began to believe his own fans. He began to believe there were millions of them, per the 1.something ratings he was getting each week, worshipping at the altar of his Christ-Has-Risen transfiguration.
Fangirls began writing him love letters in their online praises. “Sam is so hot.” “Dean is soo cool.” “Isn’t it cool how Dean is so hot, but like, goofs and stuff??” “And I love that they totally call each other out on shit!” “Omigod I love Bobby! That one time when he rolled his eyes? So awesome.”
Well, sure. Why not. Two easy-on-the-eyes boys running around cocking weapons. What’s not to love.
And Eric, religiously going on the web as he freely admits he does, began seeing “Eric is a god.” “Eric Kripke, the owner of my heart.”
And rather than having even his “Oh crap, now I have a show, what do I do?” Tarzan moment, Eric instead took one look around and went, “I RULE.”
The startled deer from the first season of the show was gone, and Eric lost his fucking mind.
He began to believe he was brilliant, and clever as fuck, and just very, very cool. His attitude underwent a smarmy, bizarre change. He began to swagger in his manner of speech. His mode of dress went metro. He could say and do no wrong.
His appearance at convention panels with his cast and writers began to take on a train-wreck fascination, in which he would say the most bizarre, insulting things about any and all of them if it so pleased him.
The clichéd, only-a-lame-Midwestern-upbringing “rock” soundtrack began to take ascendance. The car, because fangirls had taken a lovin’ to it because Dean loved it, got shoved down our throats. To the point where Eric had to let us know, in case we thought he was interested in whatever it was a showrunner ought to be interested in, that one of the boys would died before anything would happen to the car. (That was my all-time favorite moment at the 2008 Comic Con panel, in which, if I remember correctly, Jensen Ackles blinked.)
It didn’t stop with the denigration of the actors. It extended to the writers. Everything that happened wrong, or bad, or didn’t get realized in the season’s arc was their fault. He understood what the fangirls wanted (more bloody evisceration of females who so much as looked at Sam or Dean with interest of the sexy kind), if only his writers weren’t so stupid and laaaame. (YouTube the 2008 Comic-Con Supernatural panel.)
And so Eric became a star.
Of the most absurd show on television.
“What’s Up With the Writing On This Show?”
When I first watched Supernatural, I remember thinking, why does everybody talk so much?
They talk about things that happened that we didn’t get to see. They talk about things that happened that we did see. They talk about the things they’re about to do. They talk about the things they should be doing, right now, as they’re talking about needing to do it.
Let’s sit in this motel room and talk about it for half an hour. Or go into this old church and do same. Perhaps we’ll do so while dressed up as FBI agents. Or doctors. Or even school teachers. No one will ask questions. Ever.
Then in the last three minutes of the show, we’ll do something physical. That way we’ll keep our reputations as badasses. Ohhkay.
The first time the much-talk-about Daddy Badass showed up, I thought we were going to get some form of Garth Ennis’s Preacher. But one episode in I found myself wondering why the heck this guy was supposed to be legendary, feared among demons. Here was a character who never did anything worth mentioning on the show.
I mean, you don’t have to tell me I don’t ever want to meet Angelus. I saw what the character was capable of. But John Winchester. He’d done all this cool stuff and...written it all down in a book.
But more than the characters, it was the relationships that struck me as completely topsy-turvy. The brother who got dragged around by the revenged-obsessed father wasn’t the one who despised the father? Instead it was the much younger one who got to go off to college and be all he could be?
When I first saw him yelling at the father I thought, “Well, this is contrived. Does he even know what to yell about?”
But was only the beginning of what a friend of mine tagged the “absurd” relationships on the show.
Exhibit One: Daddy Was a Bad Man: In the first year of the show airing, while parking her car for a Supernatural panel in LA, the valet at the underground parking - and if you’ve ever lived in LA you know that they’re mostly Hispanic and most can barely speak English - asked her where she was headed. She told him for which panel.
His eyes lit up. “Have they found their father?” “No, not yet,” my friend replied, giddily handed him her keys and chatting excitedly for a while before giddily running into the panel.
The moment lies in this: that his man, who probably understood only half of what he was hearing on the show, understood the mythological pull of the journey to find the father.
Eric Kripke did not.
Rewind back a little. Following his ceaseless attempts to crap all over his own show, the fates were kind enough to send Eric Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the role of the missing father.
Morgan, the most significant thing to have happened to the female psyche since the fermentation of cocoa, had enough on-screen chemistry with Jensen Ackles to make even a cynic quiet down and watch. His presence in an episode almost invariably elevated the characters. Suddenly you could see why the boys were the way they were. It negated the need for the hokey plotlines the show immensely suffers from. It was motivation without the need for explanation.
And what did Eric do with this blessing? He killed him off.
Why? Because Eric from day one was itching to kill someone. It’s easier than writing them. And because Daddy was a bad man. (My apologies, I can’t find the article in which Kripke talks about this.)
Eric never knew what to make of this character, who didn’t fit in with the juvenile “Route 66” idea he not-so-secretly harbored for the show. So after a season of having to work way too hard to work that storyline, daddy got the axe.
And subsequently got demonized. Whether by fangirls feeding into Eric or Eric feeding into fangirls, or Eric tripping over some wires and retro-fitting “complex” into the reasons for killing off the father, who knows.
So then of course the obvious: the man who’s “there for them” at every improbable turn, the deus cranking on their machina, why, he must be the good daddy.
For Eric, “complex” is a five-dollar word. But if you say complicated, well, he is all over that like a rash.
Bringing us to...
Exhibit Two: Sam Is Fucking Who?!: Or, the mother of all bad writing.
Sam is fucking Ruby. Ruby is a demon who inhabits the bodies of dead females, killed off in a previous season due to budgetary constraints. The character is an erstwhile enemy of the brothers, by virtue of being a, you know, dead-girl-inhabiting demon.
But Sam can’t be fucking Ruby.
Why? Because Sam knows that that would be practicing necrophilia.
But in the fourth season opener, Sam did just that. We see a young woman, cotton-pantied up and leaving the rest of her delicate under things lying around, in a sleazy motel room (the rent-by-the-hour kind) with Sam. Sam immediately throws her out pimp-ho style the minute his resurrected brother comes knocking (See: “Misogyny” below).
Here comes the good part:
We then later see this same woman presented as Ruby the demon girl.
In this later scene, Sam seems to know precisely who she is, but with no indication whatsoever that they had encountered prior to this scene, much less spent unseen scenes fornicating in a motel room.
Confused? The online fangirl brawl over this absurdity was as sad as it was...sad.
Even the fluffers over at TV Guide were perplexed. But no one knew what to do. The actor who played Sam was making some shit up.
And Kripke was keeping kripkially mum. “Ooooohh!”
Which is what you do when you have no idea what just happened.
Which brings us to:
Exhibit Three: We Like Our Misogyny Piping Hot: I don’t think for a moment that Eric Kripke is a misogynist. He lacks either the depth of understanding that could cause such a backlash in a person’s mind, or the simple evil.
But what has happened is that he’s co-opted the attitudes of women who do have this tendency. In women, this behaviour comes out of an otherwise healthy sense of competition for the attention of men.
If you’re dressed up in a bar and circling the same hot guy as three other women, oh yeah, it’s on. But if you’re in a place where anonymity is the most powerful thing going, and jonesing after actors on a TV screen is the order of the day, then bitches & skanks is every girl trying to move in on/talk back to/have sex with your guys.
Whether or not spewing bile is harmless fun is not the issue. At issue is how on earth a showrunner can now take this as a mandate for how he’s going to present 90% of the female characters on his show.
I don’t want to go into how fucked-up that is. All I’ll end up doing is regressing and throwing out phrases like “fucking pig.” And who does that help?
An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery Wrapped in A...
What is this “myth arc” of which you speak?
Have any of you ever seen the scene in Chasing Amy in which Jason Lee sits in the audience at a sci-fi convention panel, listening to some guy rant about the vilification of Darth Vader as relating to him being presented in the guise of a Nubian god? And Jason Lee gets up, all earnestness, and asks “What’s a Nubian?”
Now you have to imagine Eric in the early days, at a development meeting with the Warner execs. You have to picture them saying, “Now Eric, the mythology of the show isn’t very strong. We need a strong myth arc to carry us through season two and beyond, something with real backbone. And especially now with the father gone…”, and Eric wide-eyed and vapid, eventually working up the nerve to ask...
Well, you get the idea.
Q1: In “Mystery Spot,” did the Trickster really bend time or just Sam’s mind (e.g. another dream-like experience akin to DaLDoM [whatever that means]) or both?
Kripke: Sorry to be Dungeon Master here, but again, I’m not gonna answer. What do you think?
Ha ha. I’ll tell you what I think, Eric. I think you don’t know. And worse, you don’t care to know. You didn’t write the fucking episode, you couldn’t care less how the writer would have to explain it. Nevermind that it’s your show.
But maybe this might help:
John Shiban is incapable of a B-plot: Know this, Eric, and do something about it.
Sara “Six-Minutes-of-Dialogue” Gamble: When you have no budget, talk. Or, when you have no ideas, talk.
She seems oblivious to the fact that she's writing for a visual medium, one that does away with the need for all but the most unavoidable of expository dialogue. She simply talks her characters through all but the last five minutes of an episode.
What am I talking about? Specifically, the season three episode Jus In Bello. I stopped halfway through the episode as there was no point in finishing it. I've seen more story substance in old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Let me repeat: the problem is not a budgetary one. It’s a lack of imagination. When backed financially into a one-set corner on Angel, the writers put the lead characters on a submarine in World War II, squeezed every last drop out of their imaginations, and created one of the most memorable episodes in television.
“No talky,” Angel would have said to Sam and Dean.
Ben Edlund is the Best Thing You’ve Got Going For You: Freak that he might be, we’ve had our eye on him, and he is capable of turning out some astonishing work. Way above your pay grade. So if you’d just put egos aside for a minute and listen to what he’s trying to say, you might see a light at the end of the tunnel for your show.
And lastly,
John Constantine is Not Your Salvation: Reader, if you don’t know him, look him up. You may also know him as Castiel.
John Constantine in the guise of an angel. It would be funny if it was meant to be ironic and not a shameless rip-off. While you’re at it, Eric, can we also expect him to be hardcore bi? Because I think Dean might get a very rich myth arc out of that one.
An ultimate evil named Lilith; the use of sulfur against demons...
Well, Alan Moore, Mike Carey, and the editors over at Vertigo Comics called. They want their shit back.
And so we come to our conclusion.
Luck is the Draw; the Rest is How You Play the Game
Eric, you’re not smart. You’re not clever, you’re not cool, and more than half the time, the stuff you say isn’t even logical.
To anyone closely watching, it’s quite obvious you’re making this up as you go along.
But. You have what 99% of the kids out there don’t have, and that’s a TV show. And a potentially phenomenal one at that.
So pop a downer. Stop reading silly twitterings and getting off on the adulation of small-minded fangirls, and acknowledge that every May at the upfronts you’re skating on thin ice.
Get a real showrunner/executive producer on your staff. If Kim Manners and his crew are practically redefining what TV can look like every other week on a budget of crackers and lemonade; if your actors are wringing every last piece of jesus fuck out of your steaming pile of dialogue; if fucking Ellsworth Jim Beaver is on your goddamned show, then you owe them the very best you can give them.
You don’t owe them stroking off on the internet. You don’t owe them oblivious, insulting jabs at Comic Con panels. And you certainly don’t owe them half-baked ideas and season arcs.
Become self-conscious. Take a hard look at yourself and the serious nuts and bolts you need to put into this show.
Call up Tim Kring. I just got the news while I was writing this part up. Kring is a nicer guy than you and with a slightly larger brain. And yet he sat in those offices and on Comic Con panels rubbing himself into ecstatic heights while his show had no concept/direction beyond a pilot script. Look where he is now. Fired.
Your show is in a better position than Heroes. You have characters, not insta-plots. Get your ass up to Vancouver and be on set to watch what works and what doesn’t. Maybe hear some fresh ideas from your players.
At this point I’m not sure who’s going to give you the money for add-on producers. Warners sure isn’t. But if I were you, and I stood the chance of having my show dumped once the lead-in show we’re piggy-backing went off the air, I’d give Satan himself half my paycheck to come save the show.
Sadly, in the end, the show simply isn’t that important in the grand scheme of advertising dollars. It’s a gasping-for-ratings, half-forgotten on an almost-forgotten network, which no one outside of a dedicated group of horny females watch. [And reader, if you take that too seriously, I’ll have to fail you.]
I write this because I love genre television. I love the supernatural. (I mean, the title of the show co-opted the entire genre; of course I had to watch.)
I love that every week we get to stand behind people braver than us and cling to their shirts, peeking over their shoulders while they fearlessly face and vanquish evil. Since Buffy and Angel left, we haven’t had anyone dragging us moaning into the dark side. And quite frankly, we miss that.
And because I love Kim Manners and the talent of your whole production crew. Manners clearly glass-is-half-full attitude to what must be one of the most frustrating gigs in television is a source of reassurance that there’s still hope for Sam and Dean.
Too bad it’s just not enough.
That said, I think I’m done.
Comments are unmoderated and unscreened. I’ve had my say, feel free to have yours.
Eric Kripke & the Lost Boys of Supernatural
This has been a long time coming.
This rant, for lack of a better word, is directed at Eric Kripke, the showrunner of the Warner Bros television show Supernatural, which is currently airing on the CW network.
It’s not meant to be anything other than what it is: an airing of a grievance I have with the way Kripke has run his show into the ground.
It’s not meant to be merely for throwing out insults, either, though I’ve pulled no punches.
It’s written rather in the hopes that Kripke will listen, and learn, that there’s always room for correcting mistakes, and always opportunities to turn things around. And failing that, that Warners Bros will fire the motherfucker and replace him with someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.
With that, we begin:
Who Is Eric Kripke, and Where Did He Come From?
Eric Kripke is a writer/producer for television, hired in 2004/5 by Warner Bros television to create and run a genre TV show for them.
The show, Supernatural, briefly, is about two brothers who travel the continental US [apparently defying the laws of space and time] in search of and destroying demons wherever they might be.
The show is a study in contradictions. On the one hand with a physical production team so excellent it’s almost unbelievable for television, and on the other hand quite possibly the worst creative team working in modern-day television.
Eric, you see, is the worst kind of Hollywood functionary: a smarmy hack, and a self- and fangirl-aggrandized asshole. (The latter birthing the former.)
In 2003, Eric Kripke was approached by Warner Bros Television to make a TV show about Tarzan or the Apes. Tarzan, as you may recall, is a century-old character in which so much story lies, that the creator was able to crank out FOUR DECADES of material before he finally laid down his pen and died.
Eric, on the other hand, was a TV writer whose merits as a TV writer were, up until that time, mostly make-believe.
Nevertheless, Warners called on Eric, and Eric called on his peanut brain, and created a “piece of crap called Tarzan.”
I wrote a 50-page story that ended. Then it got made and I had something in production and it was all my dreams come true. They said to me, "Let's do 12 more." I said, "Uh, wait! What's the story?"
Wait, what?
So, Tarzan was a hell ride in every way, and we only did eight before they wisely put us out of our misery. But I think Warner Bros. appreciated that I stood proudly on the deck of the Titanic with my violin and just played away. I never tried to dress as a woman and get off the boat… I just went right down with that ship.
-Creative Screenwriting Weekly 05/09/08 issue
I encourage you to read the whole jaw-dropping article. The idea that he set the ship on its course, and watched with detached interest as the ice-berg approached, never enters his mind.
I watched Tarzan when it aired. Every single episode. It was, and still is, inexplicable in its shittiness. If Eric knew this, why on earth wouldn’t he do something about it?
But, Tarzan was soon in the past.
Fast forward two years. Warners approaches Eric with a new show they want to make.
Why go back to the worthless writer who couldn’t deliver modern take out of a wealth of material? Why, that’s Hollywood, of course!
Sit down, hold on to your crash helmet, we’re going in.
Approached for a new show, Eric wanted to do, and I quote him here, “a sub-par rip-off of Night Stalker.” Wisely, Warners said no. So, bullshitting his way through the meeting in the best tradition of hacks in Hollywood, Eric finally blurted out something the execs could envision. They latched on to the idea of a show about two brothers investigating the paranormal.
The then-existing WB network (a very smart, albeit not my cup’a, creation of Warner TV’s parent company, Warner Bros Studios) ate up the idea.
Now came the what-the-fuck.
Eric turned in the pilot draft.
I cared so much about every little detail and filling every hole that it ended up being way too much exposition.
Nothing’s changed, Eric.
It didn't have the same kind of loose freewheeling sense of humor the series ended up having. It was very, very serious. I must have spent three months writing it, turned it in, and the studio threw it out. They said, "We're not crazy about it." I heard, "We're wiping our butt with it." I said, "Let me find a way to simplify the back story." So, [producer Peter Johnson and I] said, "What if the boys grew up with Dad so they don't need any of this stuff explained to them?" All of a sudden, a two-page exposition scene just becomes a couplet of dialogue.
How about this, Eric. How ‘bout you google - no need to even go spend the money on books you should already have - how about you google “how to write a screenplay” and see the first piece of instruction that comes up. “Don’t write exposition!” It’s understanding basic to monkeys with typewriters, how much more showrunners making $30,000 a week.
Eric turned in a second draft.
Warners said: Ya can’t kill the dad.
"Please keep the father alive. It provides a place for them to go and a certain amount of hope for the boys. It's not so nihilistic."
I’ll do you one even better: It hits the primal. It transcends the need for words and explanations. What men do because of their fathers is timeless, something even Neanderthals could grasp.
But it took Eric a thunk on the head to get it. So he thought, But someone had to die. The studio and network were giving me all these notes about Sam's girlfriend, [Jessica, played by Adrianne Palicki], who survived originally. Can she make phone calls with the boys? How's their relationship going to develop? Are they meant for each other?
Good! We’ve got something here! Lots to work with, things to build up and break, emotions to disappoint, twists and turns.. Great, great!
I was horrified by the idea of telling a relationship b-story while you're trying to avert Armageddon in the A-story, so I went back to them and said, "Good news! I've figured out exactly how we're going to develop the girlfriend's story." They said, "How?" I said, "I'm going to burst her into flames on the ceiling."
The execs at Warners: *headdesk*
We fast forward again.
Supernatural Is On The Air
Some of you might not know who Kim Manners is. But I will tell you right now, that quite possibly the only reason the show wasn’t cancelled somewhere around season two, was that it didn’t have the production values of Highlander The Series.
And for that you can thank Kim Manners. Manners is what made the X-Files the X-Files. Not by himself of course, but his visual style, his ability to make a My Little Pony tea party seem like the most menacing thing you’ll ever attend, and the most innocuous of suburban streets look like something out of Lovecraft, (sadly, you don’t get a lot of this on his current show), is what made Kim Manners a one of a kind.
The gods of fortune gave Eric Kim Manners.
What does Eric do with it? Hear it from Kim Manners himself:
“We had a script this year that I directed myself, and Jared and Jensen didn’t particularly care for. And we talked to Eric and Bob [Singer] about it, and we had a long discussion and we made the determination that we would have to work that much harder to make it work. And we did.”
This is Manners having manners. If you read the missing lines, what he’s trying to tell you is that Eric, sitting in a room in L.A. while the crew is on set in Vancouver, didn’t see what the problem was with the script.
When actors don’t “care for” a script, there’s literally nothing there. When you have a “long discussion” with the showrunner and nothing changes, you’re up a creek. And when you still have to “work that much harder” to have something you can put on the air, waylay your so-called showrunner and beat his head in.
What, precisely, is a showrunner doing in Los Angeles while his crew is working 4am to god-knows-when in a different city? This isn’t Law & Order Spin-off Thirteen. This is your baby, the only thing you’ve got going for you from here until who knows. There are no guarantees for what’s next.
The actors know this.
But Eric had a different path in mind for himself.
A Deer In Headlights. At First.
The first time I saw Eric Kripke was on behind-the-scenes footage on the season one DVDs of Supernatural. He looked like a deer in headlights.
Not having been mentally quite present when the execs (now gone, if I’m reading things correctly) at Warners were telling him how to make a real show, Eric seemed quite unprepared by the white-hot cult success of his show with the pulsating mass of fangirls.
While the DVD footage was being filmed, which would be while the first season was being aired, he appeared still a desperate, harmless, writer/producer hoping for a hit. His plaintive outreach to the fans was interesting to watch, fear winking in his eyes like beacons of SOS.
But he was, dare I say endearing, and stirred hope in my thoughts, that with so many wonderful elements operating on his show, he might have inadvertently given us one of the most gripping genre shows on television.
But. Season three rolled around, maybe even as early as season two, and Eric had discovered online fans/fandom, and, stupidly, had taken it all to heart.
Turn Off Your Fucking Headlights, I Am Now “a God”
It took me a little while to catch on. But, fascinated, I watched as the show began to go from “There’s an idea here...” to “Why has this show suddenly become so…?”
The word is obnoxious.
Eric suddenly, or gradually, began to believe his own fans. He began to believe there were millions of them, per the 1.something ratings he was getting each week, worshipping at the altar of his Christ-Has-Risen transfiguration.
Fangirls began writing him love letters in their online praises. “Sam is so hot.” “Dean is soo cool.” “Isn’t it cool how Dean is so hot, but like, goofs and stuff??” “And I love that they totally call each other out on shit!” “Omigod I love Bobby! That one time when he rolled his eyes? So awesome.”
Well, sure. Why not. Two easy-on-the-eyes boys running around cocking weapons. What’s not to love.
And Eric, religiously going on the web as he freely admits he does, began seeing “Eric is a god.” “Eric Kripke, the owner of my heart.”
And rather than having even his “Oh crap, now I have a show, what do I do?” Tarzan moment, Eric instead took one look around and went, “I RULE.”
The startled deer from the first season of the show was gone, and Eric lost his fucking mind.
He began to believe he was brilliant, and clever as fuck, and just very, very cool. His attitude underwent a smarmy, bizarre change. He began to swagger in his manner of speech. His mode of dress went metro. He could say and do no wrong.
His appearance at convention panels with his cast and writers began to take on a train-wreck fascination, in which he would say the most bizarre, insulting things about any and all of them if it so pleased him.
The clichéd, only-a-lame-Midwestern-upbringing “rock” soundtrack began to take ascendance. The car, because fangirls had taken a lovin’ to it because Dean loved it, got shoved down our throats. To the point where Eric had to let us know, in case we thought he was interested in whatever it was a showrunner ought to be interested in, that one of the boys would died before anything would happen to the car. (That was my all-time favorite moment at the 2008 Comic Con panel, in which, if I remember correctly, Jensen Ackles blinked.)
It didn’t stop with the denigration of the actors. It extended to the writers. Everything that happened wrong, or bad, or didn’t get realized in the season’s arc was their fault. He understood what the fangirls wanted (more bloody evisceration of females who so much as looked at Sam or Dean with interest of the sexy kind), if only his writers weren’t so stupid and laaaame. (YouTube the 2008 Comic-Con Supernatural panel.)
And so Eric became a star.
Of the most absurd show on television.
“What’s Up With the Writing On This Show?”
When I first watched Supernatural, I remember thinking, why does everybody talk so much?
They talk about things that happened that we didn’t get to see. They talk about things that happened that we did see. They talk about the things they’re about to do. They talk about the things they should be doing, right now, as they’re talking about needing to do it.
Let’s sit in this motel room and talk about it for half an hour. Or go into this old church and do same. Perhaps we’ll do so while dressed up as FBI agents. Or doctors. Or even school teachers. No one will ask questions. Ever.
Then in the last three minutes of the show, we’ll do something physical. That way we’ll keep our reputations as badasses. Ohhkay.
The first time the much-talk-about Daddy Badass showed up, I thought we were going to get some form of Garth Ennis’s Preacher. But one episode in I found myself wondering why the heck this guy was supposed to be legendary, feared among demons. Here was a character who never did anything worth mentioning on the show.
I mean, you don’t have to tell me I don’t ever want to meet Angelus. I saw what the character was capable of. But John Winchester. He’d done all this cool stuff and...written it all down in a book.
But more than the characters, it was the relationships that struck me as completely topsy-turvy. The brother who got dragged around by the revenged-obsessed father wasn’t the one who despised the father? Instead it was the much younger one who got to go off to college and be all he could be?
When I first saw him yelling at the father I thought, “Well, this is contrived. Does he even know what to yell about?”
But was only the beginning of what a friend of mine tagged the “absurd” relationships on the show.
Exhibit One: Daddy Was a Bad Man: In the first year of the show airing, while parking her car for a Supernatural panel in LA, the valet at the underground parking - and if you’ve ever lived in LA you know that they’re mostly Hispanic and most can barely speak English - asked her where she was headed. She told him for which panel.
His eyes lit up. “Have they found their father?” “No, not yet,” my friend replied, giddily handed him her keys and chatting excitedly for a while before giddily running into the panel.
The moment lies in this: that his man, who probably understood only half of what he was hearing on the show, understood the mythological pull of the journey to find the father.
Eric Kripke did not.
Rewind back a little. Following his ceaseless attempts to crap all over his own show, the fates were kind enough to send Eric Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the role of the missing father.
Morgan, the most significant thing to have happened to the female psyche since the fermentation of cocoa, had enough on-screen chemistry with Jensen Ackles to make even a cynic quiet down and watch. His presence in an episode almost invariably elevated the characters. Suddenly you could see why the boys were the way they were. It negated the need for the hokey plotlines the show immensely suffers from. It was motivation without the need for explanation.
And what did Eric do with this blessing? He killed him off.
Why? Because Eric from day one was itching to kill someone. It’s easier than writing them. And because Daddy was a bad man. (My apologies, I can’t find the article in which Kripke talks about this.)
Eric never knew what to make of this character, who didn’t fit in with the juvenile “Route 66” idea he not-so-secretly harbored for the show. So after a season of having to work way too hard to work that storyline, daddy got the axe.
And subsequently got demonized. Whether by fangirls feeding into Eric or Eric feeding into fangirls, or Eric tripping over some wires and retro-fitting “complex” into the reasons for killing off the father, who knows.
So then of course the obvious: the man who’s “there for them” at every improbable turn, the deus cranking on their machina, why, he must be the good daddy.
For Eric, “complex” is a five-dollar word. But if you say complicated, well, he is all over that like a rash.
Bringing us to...
Exhibit Two: Sam Is Fucking Who?!: Or, the mother of all bad writing.
Sam is fucking Ruby. Ruby is a demon who inhabits the bodies of dead females, killed off in a previous season due to budgetary constraints. The character is an erstwhile enemy of the brothers, by virtue of being a, you know, dead-girl-inhabiting demon.
But Sam can’t be fucking Ruby.
Why? Because Sam knows that that would be practicing necrophilia.
But in the fourth season opener, Sam did just that. We see a young woman, cotton-pantied up and leaving the rest of her delicate under things lying around, in a sleazy motel room (the rent-by-the-hour kind) with Sam. Sam immediately throws her out pimp-ho style the minute his resurrected brother comes knocking (See: “Misogyny” below).
Here comes the good part:
We then later see this same woman presented as Ruby the demon girl.
In this later scene, Sam seems to know precisely who she is, but with no indication whatsoever that they had encountered prior to this scene, much less spent unseen scenes fornicating in a motel room.
Confused? The online fangirl brawl over this absurdity was as sad as it was...sad.
Even the fluffers over at TV Guide were perplexed. But no one knew what to do. The actor who played Sam was making some shit up.
And Kripke was keeping kripkially mum. “Ooooohh!”
Which is what you do when you have no idea what just happened.
Which brings us to:
Exhibit Three: We Like Our Misogyny Piping Hot: I don’t think for a moment that Eric Kripke is a misogynist. He lacks either the depth of understanding that could cause such a backlash in a person’s mind, or the simple evil.
But what has happened is that he’s co-opted the attitudes of women who do have this tendency. In women, this behaviour comes out of an otherwise healthy sense of competition for the attention of men.
If you’re dressed up in a bar and circling the same hot guy as three other women, oh yeah, it’s on. But if you’re in a place where anonymity is the most powerful thing going, and jonesing after actors on a TV screen is the order of the day, then bitches & skanks is every girl trying to move in on/talk back to/have sex with your guys.
Whether or not spewing bile is harmless fun is not the issue. At issue is how on earth a showrunner can now take this as a mandate for how he’s going to present 90% of the female characters on his show.
I don’t want to go into how fucked-up that is. All I’ll end up doing is regressing and throwing out phrases like “fucking pig.” And who does that help?
An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery Wrapped in A...
What is this “myth arc” of which you speak?
Have any of you ever seen the scene in Chasing Amy in which Jason Lee sits in the audience at a sci-fi convention panel, listening to some guy rant about the vilification of Darth Vader as relating to him being presented in the guise of a Nubian god? And Jason Lee gets up, all earnestness, and asks “What’s a Nubian?”
Now you have to imagine Eric in the early days, at a development meeting with the Warner execs. You have to picture them saying, “Now Eric, the mythology of the show isn’t very strong. We need a strong myth arc to carry us through season two and beyond, something with real backbone. And especially now with the father gone…”, and Eric wide-eyed and vapid, eventually working up the nerve to ask...
Well, you get the idea.
Q1: In “Mystery Spot,” did the Trickster really bend time or just Sam’s mind (e.g. another dream-like experience akin to DaLDoM [whatever that means]) or both?
Kripke: Sorry to be Dungeon Master here, but again, I’m not gonna answer. What do you think?
Ha ha. I’ll tell you what I think, Eric. I think you don’t know. And worse, you don’t care to know. You didn’t write the fucking episode, you couldn’t care less how the writer would have to explain it. Nevermind that it’s your show.
But maybe this might help:
John Shiban is incapable of a B-plot: Know this, Eric, and do something about it.
Sara “Six-Minutes-of-Dialogue” Gamble: When you have no budget, talk. Or, when you have no ideas, talk.
She seems oblivious to the fact that she's writing for a visual medium, one that does away with the need for all but the most unavoidable of expository dialogue. She simply talks her characters through all but the last five minutes of an episode.
What am I talking about? Specifically, the season three episode Jus In Bello. I stopped halfway through the episode as there was no point in finishing it. I've seen more story substance in old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Let me repeat: the problem is not a budgetary one. It’s a lack of imagination. When backed financially into a one-set corner on Angel, the writers put the lead characters on a submarine in World War II, squeezed every last drop out of their imaginations, and created one of the most memorable episodes in television.
“No talky,” Angel would have said to Sam and Dean.
Ben Edlund is the Best Thing You’ve Got Going For You: Freak that he might be, we’ve had our eye on him, and he is capable of turning out some astonishing work. Way above your pay grade. So if you’d just put egos aside for a minute and listen to what he’s trying to say, you might see a light at the end of the tunnel for your show.
And lastly,
John Constantine is Not Your Salvation: Reader, if you don’t know him, look him up. You may also know him as Castiel.
John Constantine in the guise of an angel. It would be funny if it was meant to be ironic and not a shameless rip-off. While you’re at it, Eric, can we also expect him to be hardcore bi? Because I think Dean might get a very rich myth arc out of that one.
An ultimate evil named Lilith; the use of sulfur against demons...
Well, Alan Moore, Mike Carey, and the editors over at Vertigo Comics called. They want their shit back.
And so we come to our conclusion.
Luck is the Draw; the Rest is How You Play the Game
Eric, you’re not smart. You’re not clever, you’re not cool, and more than half the time, the stuff you say isn’t even logical.
To anyone closely watching, it’s quite obvious you’re making this up as you go along.
But. You have what 99% of the kids out there don’t have, and that’s a TV show. And a potentially phenomenal one at that.
So pop a downer. Stop reading silly twitterings and getting off on the adulation of small-minded fangirls, and acknowledge that every May at the upfronts you’re skating on thin ice.
Get a real showrunner/executive producer on your staff. If Kim Manners and his crew are practically redefining what TV can look like every other week on a budget of crackers and lemonade; if your actors are wringing every last piece of jesus fuck out of your steaming pile of dialogue; if fucking Ellsworth Jim Beaver is on your goddamned show, then you owe them the very best you can give them.
You don’t owe them stroking off on the internet. You don’t owe them oblivious, insulting jabs at Comic Con panels. And you certainly don’t owe them half-baked ideas and season arcs.
Become self-conscious. Take a hard look at yourself and the serious nuts and bolts you need to put into this show.
Call up Tim Kring. I just got the news while I was writing this part up. Kring is a nicer guy than you and with a slightly larger brain. And yet he sat in those offices and on Comic Con panels rubbing himself into ecstatic heights while his show had no concept/direction beyond a pilot script. Look where he is now. Fired.
Your show is in a better position than Heroes. You have characters, not insta-plots. Get your ass up to Vancouver and be on set to watch what works and what doesn’t. Maybe hear some fresh ideas from your players.
At this point I’m not sure who’s going to give you the money for add-on producers. Warners sure isn’t. But if I were you, and I stood the chance of having my show dumped once the lead-in show we’re piggy-backing went off the air, I’d give Satan himself half my paycheck to come save the show.
Sadly, in the end, the show simply isn’t that important in the grand scheme of advertising dollars. It’s a gasping-for-ratings, half-forgotten on an almost-forgotten network, which no one outside of a dedicated group of horny females watch. [And reader, if you take that too seriously, I’ll have to fail you.]
I write this because I love genre television. I love the supernatural. (I mean, the title of the show co-opted the entire genre; of course I had to watch.)
I love that every week we get to stand behind people braver than us and cling to their shirts, peeking over their shoulders while they fearlessly face and vanquish evil. Since Buffy and Angel left, we haven’t had anyone dragging us moaning into the dark side. And quite frankly, we miss that.
And because I love Kim Manners and the talent of your whole production crew. Manners clearly glass-is-half-full attitude to what must be one of the most frustrating gigs in television is a source of reassurance that there’s still hope for Sam and Dean.
Too bad it’s just not enough.
That said, I think I’m done.
Comments are unmoderated and unscreened. I’ve had my say, feel free to have yours.