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Folks talk a lot about SPN being subject to network TV's Standards & Practices. But I think an even bigger challenge was the limited time & budget, along with a really challenging episode & season structure. Excerpts from a great interview with Robbie Thompson about the challenges of a 23-episode season & a procedural format (edited & condensed for readability/full interview here: Behind the Scenes of Supernatural with Robbie Thompson)* — and some of my own thoughts on the impact, below.

Robbie: This isn’t a criticism, but it’s 42 minutes & a procedural show. There’s a case, and a lot of elements of that take up a lot of real estate in the script. Typically, if you wanted to hand in a script that wouldn’t get too heavily noted, you'd keep it to 38, 39 pages. And at least 20-30 pages of that is gonna end up being the blah blah blah of the case.

Robbie: The showrunners say, "This is what we’re thinking for this season," and usually it was built around a pivot point — the midseason finale. You wanna end midseason on some kind of cliffhanger & then pick it up & go this way. Then, with the general guidelines in place (the "destinations" on the "roadtrip" agreed upon), everyone pitches at the same time. So, if this was the writers’ room, you [gestures] are writing the 1st episode, you the 2nd, you the 3rd & 4th & 5th & 6th. So we’re all writing simultaneously, and sometimes it will be oh, we love that character, can we put him in your episode? And then all of a sudden those things start to kind of domino, plot-wise.

Interviewer: They’re like puzzle pieces: every time you move one, you knock the others out of place...

Robbie: And it’s a really tricky thing when you’re doing something that has 23 episodes. I’m jealous of Game of Thrones’ budget, but I’m also jealous of the episode order. My dream for Supernatural was, can we just do True Detective, just one case, and live & breathe that case. That would be fun, but in a 23 order, you just can’t do it. So, in terms of “where the story takes you,” I would never want to answer on a showrunner’s behalf, [but] I’ll just provide the context that sometimes these decisions are not so clean-cut or as narrative-based as one might think. It’s a very tough job to manage a bunch of stories & writers & production & editorial all at the same time, and then sometimes shit happens & you have to make changes on the fly.

I was just thinking about this in the context of certain criticisms of the show — especially that they didn't develop X or Y plotline enough (one example I've talked about before is Dean's alcoholism). And obviously you can't just handwave those criticisms away with "oh, but the time constraints," but I do think that those constraints often forced the creative team to be more understated than they might've preferred. And sometimes, this was a good thing — or even a great thing — and lent itself to an unusual degree of subtlety. But sometimes it meant leaving too much ambiguity, dropping threads entirely, or seeming to take certain plot developments too lightly.

I know we need to analyze and critique (and appreciate) the show as we have it, not as we imagine it might've been "if only" (the kind of supposition you could never prove), but I do think that understanding the above tends to increase a person's willingness to have patience with the show, or to accept that the substitution of a few lines, an anguished look, and/or a case-character-parallel for a whole scene directly exploring something with the impacted protagonist isn't necessarily evidence that the writers didn't care (and/or didn't want us to care) about something.

To circle back to Dean's drinking: The writers had wanted a story arc devoted to it (secondhand reports suggest they wanted to do it in season 8), but it just didn't end up working out. But then we roll around to the Mark of Cain in season 9 and (between the writers & directors & Jensen's acting choices) we get a great analogy for alcoholism in the myth-arc, instead. There are a lot of themes that are only ever explored symbolically. And you can see that as a good thing or a bad thing, but it's interesting, at least, to think about how real-world constraints may have pushed them in these directions.

(As an aside, Richard Speight, Jr., & Rob Benedict also talk about this sort of thing on several segments of the Supernatural Then and Now podcast — about how often the writers or directors would end up having to cut scenes & shots & entire plotlines that they felt were important just because of a lack of time, and a common theme from "behind the scenes" is that, compared to other similar shows, SPN did a remarkable amount with a remarkably tight budget & vanishingly little time.)

*Spoilers galore for S11:E20 "Don't Call Me Shurley" around the mid-point of that link. If you're interested in the rest of the piece, you can safely search for "procedural" & read the surrounding paragraphs or "a season of network TV" & read from there on.

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