Supernatural: It isn't Buffy Lite.

(Note: Post contains spoilers for the television series Buffy The Vampire Slayer.)

"Saving people, hunting things. The family business!"

I started watching Supernatural late in the game, I'm sad to say. Oh, I'd been hearing about it from friends for months, this amazing show about two guys out killing monsters. I heard it was snarky, funny, scary, and smart. I thought it sounded like a low-rent Buffy with two boys instead of one girl kicking ass, which seemed like kind of a poor trade. I turned it on a couple of times, but I didn't really pay attention. Somehow I'd gotten the idea that the main reason to watch it was because the guys were hot (admittedly, I might've gotten that idea because of the amount of salivating folks were doing over how hot the guys were), and it just wasn't reason enough. So I'd have it on while I was puttering on the computer or doing laundry or whatever, glancing up from time to time to look at a hot guy or two, and you know, it's like trying to understand a story by only reading every sixth or seventh paragraph: it just doesn't work. Of course you don't understand what's going on, and of course you don't care about the characters.

So one night when I had nothing to do, I remembered – near 10:00 PM, which is, east coast time, almost at the end of the show – that it was the season finale and I'd thought maybe I would watch it. So I turned it on...

...and was almost instantly hooked. I had no idea what was going on – the tall guy was pinned to a wall screaming his brother's name while some goddamned good-looking man with demonic yellow eyes was killing the other brother with his brain. And what the f**k?? Dad, don't you let it kill me? That's their DAD? I could not look away. These must have been the best performances any of those three guys turned in all season, because they held me there as tight as old yellow-eyes had Sam and Dean pinned.

From that moment through the end of the episode, I saw almost everything that my friends had been seeing all season long, in one super-condensed rush. It wasn't just two guys out killing monsters. It was two brothers so fiercely devoted to each other that either would give everything to save the other. It was a father desperate to save his boys and destroy the thing that killed their mother. It was a son searching for a way to hold his family together against terrible odds, and another torn between his father's quest and his brother's desperate need for his family.

Also, demons. Monsters. Legends. Myths. And these weren't nice white-bread middle-class kids with normal lives trying to figure out how to navigate from adolescence into adulthood whilst killing monsters and saving the world. Don't get me wrong, I think Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a brilliant television show, and that even the occasional wrong note it hit was better than 90% of what's been on TV in the last two decades. But Supernatural is different in some very important ways. Not necessarily better – although as much as I love Buffy, I do prefer Supernatural – but definitely not a re-tread, not at all.

First, there's the milieu. Buffy The Vampire Slayer is set in Sunnydale, which, despite being located on a Hellmouth, is a pretty bucolic place. Very middle-America, very middle- to upper-middle-class. Not much in the way of poor white trash on Buffy. The closest we got to that, if I remember right, was Xander, who slept outside each Christmas to avoid his family's drunken arguments, whose parents were alcoholics and whose father tore out his heart in a nightmare sequence in season four. The clothes were fashionable or even trend-setting, the houses clean with well-kept lawns, and for the first several seasons one of the biggest obstacles between the heroes and saving the world was their curfew. And when the parents were no longer around to pay the bills, decent jobs turned out to be pretty easy to come by.

In fact, Sunnydale looks a lot like the idyllic world of Dean's wish late in season two of Supernatural. It certainly looks nothing like the real world of Supernatural, with its two-lane blacktops and roadside diners, motels with questionable décor and vibrating beds, cars tricked out for weapons and holy water and days and nights on the road. Curfew hasn't been an issue in years and "normal" ended in fire and blood when Sam was still an infant. At the age when Buffy was trying out for the cheerleading squad or Willow was wrestling with whether to seduce her boyfriend, Sam and Dean had already been living for years like nomadic soldiers, hunting and killing with their father and trying to make ends meet on credit card scams, card games, and hustling pool. After all, no one pays you for getting rid of their poltergeist. If you're lucky, they don't try to have you arrested.

Second, there's the focus. Like many great shows, Buffy had an ensemble cast and did terrific things with it. Supernatural has, basically, two guys. That's it. Two guys, and some folks who drift into and out of their lives, who provide help or conflict or just a little friendly advice. Even the secondary characters are admirably well-realized, like father-figure Bobby, who wears his love for — and exasperation with — the boys on his sleeve, or Ellen, too whiskey-voiced and plain-spoken to be maternal in the way television usually gives it to us, but who's undeniably maternal anyway, yet still treats the boys like equals.

I have a feeling that the writers have detailed backstories for every character who's thrown into the mix, whether for one episode or many. We may never know what that backstory is, but someone does, and it comes through in the richness of the characters.

But no matter how many great secondary characters there are, Supernatural is about Sam and Dean Winchester, and that focus stays razor sharp. It lends an urgency to events that an ensemble show doesn't have. You don't get to stop and breathe, or curse, when the show cuts away from your favorite storyline, you don't have three characters off getting the glowy orb to save the world while two others get the trap ready, you just have Sam and Dean. It's on them. Whatever happens, whoever they're going to save, they're the ones who have to do it.

And who are they saving? Where Buffy had an apocalypse imminent every season, Supernatural didn't start to show signs that the world was in danger until near the end of season two, and it's only now in season three that we're starting to learn the nature and extent of the jeopardy.

Supernatural isn't so much about saving the world, it's about saving the people in the next town over. Saving who you can. The prostitute who's attacked by a werewolf; the little girl whose ghostly friend wants to keep her there forever; the parents whose children don't know not to let the clown in at midnight; the plane-load of people who'll die if Sam doesn't get that exorcism done before they crash.

And it's a show about family, about what we'll do for the people we love, what we'll do for our families. How far we'll go to save them.

And sometimes, that was what Buffy was about too, especially after the show introduced a kid sister for Buffy, Dawn. At the end of the episode "The Gift", wherein Dawn must (in theory) die in order to prevent the ritual that will end the world, is the following exchange:

GILES: (quietly) If the ritual starts, then every living creature in this and every other dimension imaginable will suffer unbearable torment and death ... including Dawn.
BUFFY: Then the last thing she'll see is me protecting her.[ref.]

Now that is a show I will never stop watching. And it's woven through every episode of Supernatural. In the season one finale, Dean has to kill a man who's possessed and about to kill Sam. Afterwards, Dean and Sam have this exchange:

DEAN: Hey, Sam?

SAM: Yeah?

DEAN: You know that guy I shot? ... There was a person in there.

SAM: You didn't have a choice, Dean.

DEAN: Yeah, I know. That’s not what bothers me.

SAM: .... Then what does?

DEAN: Killing that guy, killing Meg.... I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even flinch. For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do, or kill, it just.... It scares me sometimes.

And now, season three, Dean has made the ultimate sacrifice: he's sold his soul to the devil to get Sam back from the dead. He has a year to live, and Sam has a year to find a way to break that deal, because Dean won't risk even trying. Not when the demon promised him that if he did, Sam would drop dead on the spot.

And what about Sam? Well, we don't know yet.... In the first two seasons, we learned that one of Hell's generals had plans for little Sammy, but the boys shot those plans to hell along with the demonic general himself. There are demon hunters who are hunting Sam, who think he's the anti-Christ. There are demons gunning for him too, who want to take out the human who was supposed to be their leader.

But Sam's biggest danger may be from himself, and the things he's willing to do to save Dean.

Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki have been consistently turning in their best performances, and the writers are taking us down a very dark path.

I'll be going with them every step of the way.