'Supernatural' didn't last 15 years on 'brotherly love' or even Dean and Cas chemistry, here's why it …

According to the creator Eric Kripke, EP Robert Singer, and writer and EP Andrew Dabb in the TV special ‘Supernatural: The Long Road Home’, the reason for the longevity of the show is the “brotherly bond” between Sam and Dean. For some, especially the young LGBTQ Tumblr fandom who championed Destiel, it was the chemistry between Dean and Cas — the boy and the angel who would always watch over him. Neither, however, is the actual reason why the show survived so long. Instead, the reason why the show survived this long exists outside the show itself – in all the “extra-curricular'” activities that the actors and crew got up to. The first Creation Entertainment convention for Supernatural happened in 2006. Before that, from Season 1 itself, the season-end “bloopers gag reel” was established as a thing. In 2011, Misha Collins began the GISHWHES — The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, to encourage intense participation and investment of emotion, time, and money from the Supernatural fandom. Even people who had never watched the show got drawn into the GISHWHES craziness (it holds the record for the “largest media scavenger hunt”) and later drawn into the “SPN family” as a result. Collins, later followed by Ackles and Padalecki, frequently engaged with fans, to use the SPN platform for measurable good. Fans participating in charity drives organized by the cast not only got to interact with the stars but also had a sense of achievement about being a force for good, collectively, that they would never be on an individual level. The Creation Entertainment’s Supernatural conventions are not especially ground-breaking in any way either and very cynically, they are money-grabs playing on fans’ desire to have access to the cast — to have a bit of tinsel town…
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