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'Supernatural,'
spookery most horrific
New WB drama's challenge: Sustaining the pace
By Steven Rosen
The WB’s
“Supernatural” is the first of the season’s five new
science-fiction thrillers, and it arrives with a shockingly strong,
kinetic debut. With its deftly visceral, downright scary special
effects and evocative Americana settings, it sets a high standard
for such others to come as “The Invasion,” “Threshold,”
“The Ghost Whisperer” and “The Night Stalker.”
It may be that the broadcast
networks sense an opening for sci-fi this fall because of the
success of last year’s “Lost,” which has pronounced eerie
elements. Or it may be they believe our national fear of things we
can’t control or understand--suicidal terrorists, tsunami and
now killer hurricanes--is so great that we will embrace a safely fantastical
way to relieve our anxieties. That happened in the 1950s and 1960s,
when sci-fi movies and TV series like “Twilight Zone” and
“Outer Limits” subconsciously appealed to worries about nuclear
destruction.
“Supernatural," which
debuts next Tuesday at 9 p.m., is not the
kind of female-oriented programming associated with the network of
“Gilmore Girls,” “Reba” or, going back, even “Buffy the
Vampire Slayer.” In fact, some terrible things happen to some very
beautiful young women in the first episode. One hesitates to even
call it sci-fi. It’s closer in tone to horror.
Starring “Smallville’s”
Jensen Ackles and “Gilmore Girls’” Jared Padalecki as two
supernatural-fighting brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester, it has a
(very tough) “Hardy Boys” meets “X-Files” quality. What
remains to be seen is whether it can develop enough of a continuing
narrative to make individual episodes combine to form a whole.
It also has a supercharged
folkloric quality, with writer/executive producer Eric Kripke
recasting the kind of legends kids once told around a campfire--the mournful lady in white who leads men to their death on lonely
roads, to recall one--into popular entertainment of the moment. There is such a
woman in the first episode, but the use of fluttering jump cuts and
morphing shape-shifting special effects makes her more MTV-like au
courant than quaint. But she’s still frightening, especially when
the blood starts flying.
The first show starts with a
shiver-inducing prologue. When Dean and Sam are children (Sam just a
baby, actually), their mother finds a mysterious intruder in Sam’s
room at night. In the panic that follows, their father (Jeffrey Dean
Morgan) finds her splayed and afire on the ceiling and gets the kids
out just before the conflagration engulfs their quiet Lawrence,
Kan., home.
The series then moves to Sam at
Stanford, living with a blonde co-ed and estranged from his caustic,
older brother. The latter is devoting his life to working with
distraught dad to track down and destroy the kind of legendary
spooks, ghosts and monsters that killed mom. Dean keeps an arsenal
of weapons inside his old relic of a car for such an occasion. But
dad is missing while tracking the lady in white to rural Jericho,
Calif., and Dean wants Sam to come help find him. And her.
As envisioned by
“Supernatural,” the place they go to looks like a mournfully
Gothic version of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina World,” with its
old farmhouses, disheveled hotel rooms and decrepit bridges. The
nostalgic quality of the production design provides a striking
contrast to the high-tech special effects and sound design.
In truth, the way Dean and Sam
find and dispense with the spooky lady is the weakest part of
“Supernatural.” There’s no real mystery to it. They come, they
find and fight her, they conquer her, they escape, presumably to
keep searching for dad.
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Sept. 6, 2005
©
2005
Media Life
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Steven Rosen is a Los Angeles writer.
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