Supernatural is quite possibly the best television series you have never seen. Look up the show on various sites on-line and you’ll see episodes tagged with words like ’supernatural’, ‘drama’, ‘horror’, ’sexy’, ‘demons’, and ’sci-fi’. If a sexy supernatural horror/drama about sci-fi and demons isn’t your cup of tea, I hear Sprout soon will be running a Caillou marathon you may want to check out. Otherwise, you should buckle your seatbelt and prepare to enjoy the ride as Supernatural gears up for its fourth season this September.

At its core, Supernatural is a classic buddy film done up as a television series. Brothers Sam and Dean Winchester are the show’s central focus and protagonists. Their complicated relationship is laid out succinctly in the opening episodes of Season 1 but is more fully explored as the series progresses. Sam and Dean didn’t have a typical childhood: After their mother was killed under mysterious supernatural circumstances, their father raised them to be expert demon-hunting badasses. Sam, the more cerebral and sensitive of the two brothers, broke away from his father and brother to go to college and seek out a more normal life for himself while Dean continued on as a full-time demon hunter with Dad. Upon learning that his father has gone missing, Sam reunites with Dean and together they hit the road to unravel the mystery of their father’s disappearance and their mother’s death. Think Buffy times two, motoring across America in vintage black 1967 Chevy Impala while listening to classic rock.

Along the way, viewers are treated to encounters with paranormal standards like zombies, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and shapeshifters, as well as more exotic beasties like djinn, tulpa, vanir, and rakshasa. Watching these encounters is enjoyable because Sam and Dean are good at what they do, and they (especially Dean) take perverse pleasure in doing it. It’s also enjoyable because the encounters are just a small part of what makes Supernatural so super. Episodes are generally tightly plotted, well acted, truly scary and/or funny, and feature far better special effects than similarly-budgeted fare. The show also doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence: if you start to see parallels between an episode and a popular movie, you can be sure that the characters, later in the episode, are going to make a snarky reference to the source material. By acknowledging their source, these episodes elevate themselves from copycat to homage. Many of them actually wind up being amongst the strongest entries in the series. (See, e.g. S03E11’s “Mystery Spot”). The series also takes the time to explore the repercussions of Sam and Dean’s actions; on the people around them, on themselves. Few plot threads are left dangling for long; most wind up woven into the overall story arc one way or another.

It’s an interesting time to be a television viewer: the internet has afforded show developers the opportunity to be increasingly experimental in their approach to storytelling. Watch a show like LOST and you’re likely to see a commercial for the Hanso Foundation (a fictional organization within the LOST universe). Call the number on the commercial and you’ve taken your first step in an Alternate Reality Game designed the producers to run in parallel with the series. I’m a sucker for stuff like that. Although it is not the ratings powerhouse that is LOST, Supernatural has dipped its foot in similar outside-the-box waters. It’s done so in two ways:

(1) In one episode in the second or third season, a phone number is mentioned during a voicemail call. Try calling the number yourself, and you are off and running on an entertaining little Supernatural ARG. It doesn’t approach the breadth or depth of The Lost Experience, or even what Heroes fumblingly tried to do with its Primatech Paper ARG, but hey, it’s something.

(2) There has been a strong story arc since the very first episode, but early on episodes were more likely to take a “monster-of-the-week” approach. In its first season, the show’s conceit was that the urban legends/monsters were all rooted in ‘reality.’ If an episode referred to the haunting of a particular schoolhouse in Ohio, for example, viewers could rest assured that a quick Google search would yield articles about that very schoolhouse. The show, therefore, operated on two levels simultaneously: on its surface, each week told a good yarn. Viewers that chose to dig a bit deeper and research the events or items mentioned in the story would be rewarded with the second level: the myths and legends upon which the story was based. This seems to have been largely abandoned as the series has progressed and developed an arc and mythology of its own. Rather than coopting existing real-world urban legends and tales, recent episodes have shifted their focus to the fictional universe of the show itself.

Although it merits as large an audience as its forefather, The X-Files, Supernatural has yet to break into the awareness of the general public to become the pop culture phenomenon it deserves to be. The pilot episode drew 5.69 million viewers. Now with three seasons under its belt and an arc mapped out through season 5 (when showrunner Eric Kripke hopes to end the show “on a high note”), it is struggling to draw on average about 3 million viewers per episode, and the show has had to let go fine additions to the cast for purely budgetary reasons. Perhaps its failing to find a foothold is attributable to its airing on the CW rather than a major network and because its leading men are two CW-ish looking guys with CW-ish prior resumes. Then again, when The X-Files began airing, FOX wasn’t the contender it is today – it was just an upstart. Arguably, The X-Files is part of what brought FOX to the fore. Four seasons into its run, it doesn’t appear Supernatural is doing the same for the CW. In fact, according to the Renew/Cancel Index, developed by Bill Gorman as a predictor of whether a show is ripe for cancellation, Supernatural is dangerously close to being on the bubble. Then again, FOX got behind The X-Files and promoted the hell out of it. By comparison, the CW treats Supernatural like an ugly stepchild.

If you haven’t seen Supernatural yet, there’s no time like the present to start. Season 4 promises to be a fun ride.