All Things Supernatural and Scary

One of the occupational hazards of being the parents of young children is we don’t get to watch much TV together. At some point we broke down and bought a tablet we can give the kids so they can go into one of their bedrooms and enter a kind of Screen Time Thunderdome. Two kids enter, only kid gets to watch what they want. Meanwhile my wife, Mildly Sensational, and I do our best to tune out the sounds of close quarters combat and screaming coming from one of their rooms and watch something that we want to watch on our TV. It always feels vaguely naughty, like any minute our parents are going to burst in and find us making out while watching Cinemax, although I think Cinemax has long since shed the “Skinemax” moniker like a butterfly shedding a chrysalis.

When we do get a chance to watch something there are a few shows we watch pretty regularly. One of our favorites is Doctor Who, and we’re both stoked about the new Doctor with Jodie Whittaker in the title role. We’ve also enjoyed the Netflix remake of Lost in Space. I think the cast is phenomenal, the pacing is great, and the stakes are super high. We watched all The Defenders together and that was ok. Not as strong as the first seasons of Daredevil or Jessica Jones, but enjoyable. The one we keep coming back to, and the one for which my wife is as close as I think she will ever get to being called a superfan of anything, is Supernatural. 

If you haven’t encountered Supernatural you must have been living in some remote area of another continent, where, even if you had a TV, it would be smashed, and the components used to fashion primitive tools. This CW show has more episodes now than M*A*S*H and is in its fourteenth season. There is no question at all this show is a fan favorite, and the fans are keeping it alive. The story centers around brothers Sam and Dean Winchester who travel the country, evading the law, and responding to stories of people dying under bizarre circumstances. A lot of the episodes fall into “monster of the week,” especially in the first season or two, but there is a large overarching story. As the title suggests, the show deals with the supernatural and all the ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and things that go bump in the night that you might expect. It wouldn’t be far off the mark to say that each episode is like a small horror movie, which is where we get into the comic.

Mildly Sensational can be very animated when she’s watching a show. She becomes very invested in what’s happening and will start shouting warnings to the characters on the screen, or reacting to the action as though she were the one in imminent mortal peril. When we watch Supernatural she will yell at the characters, shouting unheeded warnings of imminent violent death, then react as though she had switched places with them when the monster inevitably jumps out and turns the situation from ominous and foreboding to violently dangerous.

There is always a choice to be made when watching these shows with her. Do I watch the show, because it’s genuinely good and I’m enjoying it, or do I watch her as she reacts to what’s happening to Sam and Dean in this episode? It’s not that I find her reactions entertaining, it’s something else. Her involvement in, and interaction with, the action as it unfolds as predetermined by the show’s creators, regardless of the intensity of her impassioned pleas, is oddly endearing. If you were to be sitting with us and randomly ask the question, what is it you love about your wife (which I suggest you never do, because, really, it’s none of your business) I would just point at Mildly Sensational as she shouts at the TV from a fetal position and say, “this. Right here. How can you not love this?”