#shows like TVD and The 100 and that fucking Charmed reboot

[bogunicorn]

Love me some SPN fandom clowns but some of y'all have a ridiculously overinflated idea of how much money SPN made lol

Also, as much bad press the finale got CW, the actual fan reaction and ratings and all that... were the same as always. The queer/lefty side of the SPN fandom is very, very over-represented on social media. Realistically, the viewerbase was split down the middle blue and red. There are waaaaay more conservative/Republican/whatever regular SPN viewers than y'all think -- and they're usually over-represented in Nielsen ratings, because they tend to be older and are more likely to be Nielsen houses in the first place.

SPN also makes the rights holders a good little chunk of money from TNT syndication and conventions, which doesn't count toward "money SPN made from airing on the network", really. Not in a way that would determine if they got cancelled or not, anyway. Pedowitz probably wouldn't have minded his steady mid-list show back, but when he teased that on Twitter, I promise you his mind was more on getting people to continue buying absurdly expensive convention tickets despite the pandemic existing and the lack of "future episode"-style mystery. He knows as well as anyone that eventually the main actors won't want to do the intense SPN convention circuit anymore, and as soon as Jared or Jensen drop out for multiple cons a season or decide they don't want to be there at all, whatever profits are coming out of Creation are going to drop like a rock.

I like a "No SPN is why CW finally called it quits" joke as much as the next person, but the fact is that the CW was already a piddly-ass little channel from the word Go that's never once been run by anyone who knows how to make money. Also, the reason the Arrowverse didn't make them actual profit is likely the same reason why Disney blockbusters barely make movie theaters money: the licenses are fucking expensive. Whatever profit was actually made off of Arrowverse, a majority of it probably went right back to DC so they could retain the rights to air the shows in the first place.

I know it's difficult to wrap your head around the idea that a company could run for like 17 years without making any money, but TV and movie studios move around SO MUCH MONEY to get things made that at some point big fucking chunks of that money are just kinda made up lol. I don't mean "money is imaginary", I mean bigger companies like that do a lot of moving stuff around and leveraging debt and making just enough to keep going but not enough to be profitable. CW was also pretty okay at merchandising the fuck out of anything popular, I imagine that helped.

They also didn't just lose SPN, a BUNCH of their shows all ended that season. That's why they pushed Walker so hard; it was one of their only new shows at the time and it had the best chance of pulling some old reliable audiences with it. They were already setting up for a rough new season, and then COVID happened.

Would they still be selling the network if SPN was still on? Probably. SPN survived the jump between TheWB and CW. If the new buyer had seen the value of a reliable little workhorse on the lineup, they'd probably keep them, too. But would they be selling if COVID hadn't happened? Who fucking knows. Maybe. Possibly not. We can't know without more details on exactly how much COVID restrictions fucked over their ongoing productions.

But was SPN the downfall of the CW? No, absolutely not. Someone has to have legs in the first place before you can kneecap them, and CW never grew any lol

ok sorry to make another post about this CW thing but like… again, it’s insane to think supernatural kept the cw afloat when spn would not have made it to s5 let alone s15 without the cw being kind of a shitshow that gave them a pass over and over. the cw kept supernatural afloat for a long time until that relationship developed into the mutually beneficial questionable mess that it was by the time s15 rolled around.

like i used to hang out on the cancellation bear website and other tv rating/cancelled show predicting websites and supernatural CONSISTENTLY was on the brink of being cancelled and in fact in season 6 and 7 got put in the friday night dealth slot… those seasons are the ones that SO CONSISTENTLY get proclaimed as ones that were ‘saved’ by cas or that the ratings only tanked in s7 when they ‘tried to write him off’ but it’s like… they were already in the graveyard slot they were already left to die… the ratings were already bad enough by the time s5 wrapped that they got moved!!! castiel was literally not a factor one way or another!! you stuck tv shows in the 9 pm friday spot to say their goodbyes and gracefully bow out.

supernatural’s saving grace was literally that it was on the cw so its shitty garbage ratings were enough to scrape by and the fact that its small audience was reliable meant that it was more economical for the cw to eventually move it OUT of that timeslot and pair it with new shows because that audience generally did not waver even when they were put in the death slot. fridays usually lead to a dip in ratings so if ur already cancelling a show, it doesnt really matter. spn’s ratings didnt dip all that much in the death slot. so the cw was like ok these collective 5 live viewers will show up no matter what so we’ll pair them in a better timeslot with some of these new shows we want to get eyes on and hopefully that will give those new shows AND spn a boost and that generally became the cw’s model for dealing with supernatural for the rest of its days. making and marketing new shows is EXPENSIVE. betting on a new show that would pull in optimistically the same or maybe a little more views than supernatural or possibly even less is a bigger risk than filling one of your timeslots with your hunk of junk that still functions well enough at the end of the day to do what you need it to do. THATS why mark pedowitz etc ended up saying spn would keep airing as long as j2 still wanted to do it. it’s bc their ratings were not astronomical but they DID NOT WAVER. and so they were reliably a good show to have to pair with new stuff and the cw was happy to keep doing that.

supernatural would not have made it past s3 on in order to develop that consistency without the cw being a tiny baby network without views or profit like i dont know how to explain to you guys that your jokes are as usual entirely based on misinformation.