SUPERNATURAL: New Showrunner Sera Gamble Talks Sam, Dean and Season 6

SUPERNATURAL fans, the boys are back tonight!

Dean has settled down with a family and Sam has been resurrected — somehow — and their presumed-dead grandfather suddenly isn’t so dead.

Yeah, we missed those Winchester brothers and their crazy adventures, too.

To celebrate the epic occasion, Give Me My Remote chatted with newly minted showrunner Sera Gamble to get her take on what was going down in season six…

First of all, congratulations on the new job!  How are the showrunning duties going?
Sera Gamble: It’s a little more hectic this season, but I’m enjoying it and Eric [Kripke] and Bob [Singer] are not only immensely gracious, but they’re so experienced and good at what they do, that the show is a well-oiled machine that is set up to keep going. It’s a good situation.

That’s good!  And obviously you’ve been on the show since Season One.  Since you know these characters so well, what are you most excited for this season?
SG: I’m excited that we told the story we wanted to tell in season five and we have a new story this season. We’re boldly starting in a new direction that way, or at least boldly starting something new. And yeah, Sam and Dean feel like family to all of us.  I kind of feel like they’re my little brothers at this point. They kind of live in my head and I think all the writers feel that way. And when a new season starts, we get excited about setting up the new circumstances for them and figuring out what they’ll do with them.

I’ve heard the angels are going to have a lesser role in this season.  Is that correct?
SG: You might not see [Castiel] so much at the beginning, but he is important to the season, he of course has an important relationship with the boys. His role unfolds as the season goes on, but you’ll first see him a couple episodes in. You will of course hear what’s going on in heaven and what’s going on in hell. The three are intertwined — Heaven, Hell and Earth — on our show. And we discussed the possibility of moving forward without incorporating the storyline, but it’s not something we’re interested in. There’s a cohesive storyline that should continue. You don’t have to live completely in the story of the apocalypse, but you should feel a cohesiveness with what’s going on. And there’s a really interesting story in what happens next.

Yes, what happens next is a very big question mark.  Let’s start with Sam: What the heck is happening with him?
SG: I can say that that is a good question to be asking, “What’s going on with Sam?”  I think that’s a question I suspect people will continue to ask in the first few episodes and theories will abound. You know, if I die and I return from the dead, you’ll cut me with silver and do the rock salt thing and holy water and do all that kind of stuff.  Nobody is being stupid about Sam, so…[pause] if there’s anything going on with Sam, it’s not obvious. But when they first reunite, there’s nothing like a good Sam and Dean reuniting scene.

You’d think they would almost be used to it at this point, considering how often they do get reunited after one of them is “dead.”
SG: Death is not the end on our show. But it’s a different situation this time. It’s not like a 48-hour demon deal kind of thing: Dean really made an attempt to move on the way he promised. He retired from hunting, he moved in with a woman, he’s been essentially helping to raise her son for the last year. He’s been, in his own Dean Winchester kind of way, doing his best to be an adult about it.

So Dean has been domesticated in a way.  Will there be any resistance on his part to go back to his old lifestyle?  He and Sam were a little codependent and something would need to change…
SG: Codependent is a hilarious word for it. I loved when — who was it that used it [in the series]? Zachariah? “Erotically codependent.”

Zachariah was hysterical.  But will Dean have problems going back to his old life?
SG: I think the fun of writing is to put yourself in the shoes of a character like that. It was all the subject of a tremendous amount of discussion for us. This show is Sam and Dean, in the car, hunting the bad thing, and in the case of season 6, trying to follow the mystery that is unfolding in front of them. At the same time, the interesting thing for Dean this season — never mind what he’s trying to set up for himself in his life, never mind setting up external circumstances that won’t work for him, he’s actually feeling attached to someone besides Sam. And we look at Dean in this stage and this character’s growth and how old he is now and how much of his life has gone by on screen and we were like,  “What would happen if there was a kid in play?”  If there was another sort of family unit and we very carefully chose the people he cared about where it wasn’t just a woman, there was a child. We thought that having a family was very important. Because Dean is about family.

And if Dean was to leave that new family unit, that’s a whole other set of problems.  Dean would be abandoning this new family, and he has some of his own daddy abandonment issues…
SG: Yeah, absolutely. There’s two sides to Dean: there’s the free-spirited, ultimate American cowboy in way, he’ll bang chicks, he’ll shoot guns. But there’s this other side of him, because he was old enough to remember what it was like to have a stable home, in a way that his little brother doesn’t, he remembers — and longs for — a stable family unit. So rather than have him choose one or the other, we’re going to see what that tension is.

Are you worried about the fan reaction to Dean being in a stable relationship?
SG: A certain segment of the fan population is protective of the boys in that way. [pause] And look, there’s going to be a certain segment {of that group} that may jump online and may jump to a conclusion about anything, but I hope they feel…each viewer is going to watch this show and decide for themselves how they feel about it, but we have a story in mind that we want to tell. We’re passionate about it, it’s a story we came to together — Bob and Eric and Ben Edlund and I have been banging heads about this since early in season five, really. We’re certainly not doing it to torture anyone, but after — when you’ve been on a show like SUPERNATURAL as long as we have, we’re also well aware that it’s impossible to please (everyone) 100% of the time. The best thing I can do to show my appreciation to the fans, — who I love and adore and I’m fully aware they are the reason we’re still on the air — is to tell the story that we collectively as the writers of SUPERNATURAL believe in. So that’s what we’re doing.

You hop online…and voices can get really loud online, but there are other voices. And everyone knows we listen. Everyone knows we give a shit. We want you to be happy. We want you to love the show. We love Sam and Dean as much as the fans do. And all I can say is that we have reasons for telling the story we are right now.

Excellent. Now, we do know Mitch Pileggi is returning to the show.  What can you tease about his storyline, since it sure seemed like his character was dead…
SG: He’s as able to come back as anyone. We love him. First of all, we were fascinated by the character of Samuel. As soon as we did that episode where we said [Mary] was from a long line of hunters, we couldn’t stop thinking about that. That became very evocative. We also had said that the Yellow-Eyed Demon had killed off a lot of her family, but we were like, “What if there were really good hunters that Sam and Dean didn’t know about?”  Because they’re really good hunters, they’re monster specialists, and this is the season where that’s a mystery and Mitch’s character is a part of that storyline. There’s a different hunter, when you think about a hunter that is part of a line that goes back — the kind of hunter Mary would have been if she had been more willing to take on the family mantle, this isn’t a hunter like Gordon or any guy in flannel that walks in on any given episode, who’s like, “I’m a hunter because I saw a vampire rip my sister’s face off.”  So I’m as well adjusted as I can be under these circumstances, now double-cross me and I’ll stab you in the neck!  That’s like, wow, you’re really scary and hard-core and you need help. You are either going to get killed, or I’m going to have to kill you or be hospitalized soon. This is, you’re in a well-adjusted house, where you get raised up and you got to college and you know you’re going to be a hunter — what do you major in? We don’t get that in depth with it, but we have had those conversations about hunters who are not insane. More like Sam and Dean who — considering the situation — are about as well-adjusted as any hunter on the show.

That’s a very good point. I know that Jensen Ackles directed an episode this season. How was that experience for everyone?
SG: He was very professional and took it very seriously. I think this is something he wanted to do for a long time, this is the sense I got. You’d have to double check with him. I’ve seen dailies and they were funny and they were good. Tonally, the episode has a lot of dry humor that I felt was Dean humor, so I thought it was an episode well-suited for him. I think it’s going to be good and everyone’s excited about it. We can’t wait to see it. I would want to walk on a set and have Jensen Ackles be my director. I think as well or better than anyone could have dreamed.

Is there anything you want to tease about season 6?
SG: You know, we consciously put a tent-pole in the first couple of episodes, because we wanted you guys to come back and get a sense of some of the mysteries that are going on.  Now we’re working on a second batch of episodes — I don’t know if you heard about the fairy episode?

I have heard about that! I’m very intrigued by that.
SG: Yeah, sometimes you just say, “Hey Ben, what do you want to do?” and it started with “Hey Ben, what are you thinking about?” and he replied, “Leprechauns.” And I was like, “Yay!” I don’t think they’re leprechauns anymore, but there might end up being a leprechaun in the episode. Basically these are all the things that would be on a 3rd grade girl’s English class folder. So that’s a fun episode that we’re doing.

Sounds like a blast. Before we go, I know Eric had a 5-year plan for the series when he started. Now that you’re in charge, do you have a set 1-year, 2-year, etc. plan for the rest of the series?
SG: One thing that I’ve learned from Eric and his five year plan is you shouldn’t say too much about this stuff to reporters because then it gets out there. And then everyone’s like, “Well, he said this, but then it turned out to be that.” So I don’t want to say too much about it. I want to say, I hope we get the opportunity to keep telling these stories.

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