Supernatural's Original Pilot Saw John in a Mental Health Facility
The longest-running American live-action fantasy TV series, Supernatural, aired for fifteen years and earned a great army of loyal fans.
It follows the feats of two brothers Sam (Jared Padalecki ) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles ) who fight monsters and demons effectively saving the world from a total collapse. The idea has won the hearts and minds of WB and later CW bosses – otherwise it would not have run for more than a decade. But the truth is the original pitch was nowhere close.
As the show was drawing to its finale in 2019 the original showrunner Eric Kipke who helmed the project for the first 8 seasons took to Twitter and posted his original pitch for the popular series on four pages dated August 30, 2004. The tweet was dedicated to Supernatural 's 300th episode.
"In honor of #SPN300, here's my original #SPN pitch from 2004. The pilot story is very different, but the tone always rang clear to me. Could never have imagined what this show became and the good it's done," he said in his congratulatory tweet.
In the very first line of his pitch Kipke describes the show as one of X-Files meeting Route 66, a show about real-life America "with darkness that bubbles and boils beneath its surface". The show should have been scary but credible – a signature feature of early X-Files. In Kipke's pitch, Sam has no idea that monsters and ghosts exist and Dean tells him that it was the monsters who killed their mother and that they were following his dad. He also says that he can see them too.
Originally, the family name was Harrison and the family head, we know as John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), was supposed to be named Jack. Sam thinks that his father lost his mind after the car accident had killed his mother. He was put in a psychiatric ward but escaped. The brothers didn't grow up hunting monsters with their dad.
Dean was taught to fight them by his father with who he spent a couple of years after he managed to find him. But the demons kill the dad. Dean kidnaps Sam who does not believe his brother thinking he is nuts, a schizophrenic, just like their dad. But at a certain moment he sees a glimpse of something demonic in the face of a policeman who is after Dean and he makes a pivotal decision to join forces with his brother and set off on a monster hunting journey.
For more details just read the pitch and decide for yourself how much different it is to what we saw in the pilot. No wonder because the writer's job is above all write and re-write as many times as their producers think is required to make the show appealing to the audiences. Nonetheless, the product which we ended up with was of the highest quality.