Jensen Ackles reflects on 'really sad goodbye' to Supernatural

The Supernatural legacy lives on.

As Jensen Ackles makes the rounds to discuss his turn as Soldier Boy in season 3 of The Boys, he's often asked about his 15-season run as Dean Winchester on the CW series Supernatural. The series, which premiered in 2005 and aired its series finale in 2020, tells the story of Dean and his younger brother Sam (Jared Padalecki) as they hunt demons, ghosts, monsters, and whatever else goes bump in the night.

By the time the show wrapped, it was the longest-running sci-fi/genre series in the history of American broadcast television, spanning 327 episodes of ghosts, gods, and brotherly love. Recently, on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Ackles was asked about the series' incredible run. "There was a reason why I think we all stuck around though, because we just truly enjoyed it," Ackles said. "It was a family."

Ackles continued, "I spent birthdays and we spent holidays and we — there was just — we went through so much together as a crew and a cast that by the end of it, it was a really sad goodbye, but something that we all felt like we really earned."

The decision to end the show came in 2019. As they were filming season 14, Ackles, Padalecki, and costar Misha Collins released a video telling their devoted fandom that season 15 would be the end. As Ackles previously told EW about the decision to end it, "[Jared] and I were always married to the fact that we never wanted to go out with a diet version of what we had. We wanted to have enough gas left in the tank to get us racing across the finish line. We didn't want to limp across."

Robert Falconer/The CW Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles on 'Supernatural'

Mission accomplished. Although COVID-19 impacted the ending, the series delivered an emotional final hour. But even that's not the end. Ackles is already working on keeping the universe alive. He and his wife, Danneel Ackles, are producing a Supernatural prequel about Sam and Dean's parents called The Winchesters.

The moral of the story is that, much like the spirits haunting its fringes, Supernatural will never truly die. Its legacy is already trickling down to future generations, including Ackles' own children. As he told Myers, his kids "adore" the animated "Scoobynatural," a crossover episode with Scooby-Doo. They'll be ready for "Bloody Mary" in no time.

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