As Seen on TV is a new weekly series of blog posts I’ll be doing in response to reading/dissecting the pilot scripts of various television programs, both old and new, and then watching or re-watching the pilot episodes they spawned, whenever appropriate.

Warning: spoilers for episodes other than the pilot are very possible.

I read two scripts for Supernatural, both the earliest draft and a much later one. I wish now that I could find more early pilot drafts for other shows, but there don’t seem to be a lot out there. What shocked me about the earlier draft was how completely different the backstory and family mythology were at that point. I’d known that Eric Kripke, the creator of the show, had originally envisioned two journalists on the road fighting evil (as opposed to the eventual Sam and Dean characters), but I had no idea that the story had still evolved so much since he’d decided to go with a pair of brothers instead. If he’d run with this earlier script, the show would’ve been a lot different. I think it would’ve been interesting to see the dynamic between the two brothers unfold, especially as they learned the trade of hunting (in this version that whole world was hidden from them when they were younger), but I don’t think that show would’ve lasted as long as the one we know has. The Winchester brothers’ complicated family history and dark, conflicted childhoods are key to the success of their characters.

The teaser of the later script opens up with a prologue depicting an incident that happened over twenty years ago…