Currently airing on E4, British fans of Supernatural can finally catch up Dean and Sam’s 11th hell-raising season. We spoke to executive producer Andrew Dabb about what to expect…
What is your favourite theme of the new series?
One thing we kind of bat around the writers room is basically how you can’t escape your past. I think we’re bringing some things in from the boys’ past, some very distant, some much more recent that we haven’t dealt with for a long time. I think we’ll have some really interesting repercussions for both brothers.
There were rumours of a Supernatural spin off. Has there been any more development on that?
It’s on the table for now. You look around right now and there’s so much genre of television out there so it’s all about what you can bring to the party that’s new. That’s what Supernatural did and does so well. Even now, even though there’s so much genre stuff out there, Supernatural does well because it has its own flavour. If an idea came along that had that same energy, had that same aggressiveness, had that same kind of appeal I think we would jump all over it. I would say right now, certainly this year, we’re not planning a spinoff.
Are there any themes in Supernatural that you would like to explore a bit more?
We’ve talked about the Kraken so much, so why haven’t we seen it? Why hasn’t it come out? I think the nice thing about Supernatural is that the themes tend to be very simple, but also very universal. It’s a bit about family, because it’s about saving your brother, and is also about saving the world. It sounds very simple in one or two lines, but it can also be very deep and take you down a lot of different paths, so that’s always been a lot of fun for us. It’s not so much the themes that change, but the explorations of the themes change.
How far ahead do you plan each series?
We think of ways where we are like, ‘Here’s the story we want to tell. If we have to tell it in one season, here’s how we could tell it. If we have the opportunity to tell it in more than one season, here’s the way we could do it.’ I don’t think it’s a case where we go in and say, ‘We definitely need 27 episodes to finish this out.’ Because the truth of the matter is you just don’t know.
The other truth of the matter is that story tends to be a very flexible thing, so you can front load things, you can back load things, you can put things off. But I will say that we’ve had the great luxury the past few years, once autumn and winter rolls around, to have some idea if we’re coming back and can start making plans at that point. We’re at the end of the season, so do we want to take a little bit of that and push it forward and make that a driving force for the next season, or do we want to wrap it all up and start something new? That’s been really fun.
Supernatural: Season 11 is airing now on E4. For more news about the latest TV series, pick up the new issue of SciFiNow.
