Starring Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester and Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester, The CW's Supernatural follows the two brothers as they've battled the forces of darkness for fourteen years, but all good things must come to an end. It was announced last month that the long-running TV series would be calling it quits with its fifteenth and final season.
For a while there, it seemed as though Supernatural would carry on forever, but stars Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles recently spoke at a fan-convention in Las Vegas to explain why it was the right time for the series to conclude. "This was a community decision. The network and the studio did not say like, 'Hey, guys, get outta here! You’re done,'" Padalecki said, with Ackles adding that, "It wasn’t an easy decision. It was months and months, if not years, of discussion between [Jared] and I, between the rest of the cast, between the crew, between our writers, between our producers, between the studio, between the network." Although some would argue that Supernatural has long since worn out its welcome, the series has a passionate fan-base who have kept it going for years, and Ackles said that they owe to to the fans not to have the show go out with a whimper.
Nobody wanted to see this show fizzle out. I think that it was everyone wanting to do the biggest service to the show that we could by going out strong. It just seemed like the writing was kind of on the wall as to when that was happening. I think everybody kind of felt that it was coming soon. So it was just taking that leap of faith of going like, 'Well, guys, let’s get out the paint and paint that finish line, and hold our heads high, because what we’ve accomplished is unlike any other.'
Jensen Ackles compared the decision to "driving the Impala, and we’re heading down the road, and it’s, like, left, you’re going to hit a ramp and go off a cliff, and it’s going to be epic, or right, you’re just going to run out of gas about 30 miles down the road in the middle of the desert with nothing around you. I’m like, ‘I’m going left. I want to go out with, like, pyrotechnics.'" Can't argue with that. Supernatural is currently nearly the end of its fourteenth season, and as the final season will consist of twenty episodes, this will bring Supernatural to an end with a whopping 327 episodes.