After all, the WB has a long history of offering up shows that mix the supernatural with teen angst; BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER; ANGEL; CHARMED; even SMALLVILLE. They don’t usually put forth supernatural shows with as obvious a title as SUPERNATURAL, but one-word titles that describe a mysterious show are in vogue right now.

SUPERNATURAL opens twenty years in the past, in a small-town home in Kansas. A mother sets her young child in his crib, his slightly older brother already tucked in. She awakens in the middle of the night and sees a shadowy figure standing over her crib. Assuming it’s her husband, she heads downstairs… where she finds her husband watching television. Suddenly frantic for her child’s safety, she runs back to his room. The husband hears a scream come from his youngest son’s room. He similarly runs upstairs and finds… a horror scene that was pretty graphic, and visually interesting and creepy as hell. Then the room bursts into flame. He and his two young sons, Sam and Dean, barely make it out with their lives before his house explodes.

Twenty years later, younger brother Sam (Jared Padalecki, leaving the safe confines of the GILMOREs’s Stars Hollow for this show) has it pretty good—he’s just aced the LSAT and has an important interview with a prominent law school in a couple days. He has a hot, barely dressed girlfriend. So the last thing he needs is his older brother Dean (Jensen Ackles, another WB alum, this time from Smallville, Kansas) to show up in the middle of the night, assaulting him (to test his former fight training) and generally disrupting his life. Yet here’s Dean. He tells Sam about his father’s disappearance while out “hunting.”

Safely away from the girlfriend’s ears, they talk and we learn that their father has been a monster-hunter for two decades now. Ever since his wife died under very suspicious and horrific causes. He’s also indoctrinated his sons into this life, teaching them the ways of the shadow world. They know about the supernatural elements that abound in this world, and they occasionally help take down these threats.

Dean is much more gung-ho about this than Sam, however. Sam just wants to be back from the quest for their missing father in time for his law school interview. What do you think the odds of that are?

They set off and follow their dad’s trail to a small town here a spate of unexplained murders has taken place. We get to see one, in fact. But these two have been trained not to be victims of ghosts or monsters’s malfeasance, so they try to help the problem while also getting ever-closer to their missing father. Along the way, Dean digs into the trunk of his Impala for guns, other weapons, fake police ID and more, to varying degrees of success with the small-town authorities.

The show sets up the brothers nicely—they banter and bicker and spar with each other in a convincing way, and the overall set-up for the show works well, too. Of course the episode features some very “WB” moments—their hair, bits of dialogue—but it’s also got a much more dark and moody feel to it, too. It’s definitely not set up as a light-hearted BUFFY-type show, although it has some good moments of humor throughout. But it also establishes the show as a sort of looser X-FILES, with the two brothers on a quest to not only track down their father, whose quest to find the person/thing that killed his wife will surely be realized at some point, but also to explore or stop various other monsters, mysteries and supernatural myths as they go. This seems to be the way of things with episodic TV now—set up a larger mystery to keep people watching but also develop the show and characters enough so that it’s intriguing week-to-week, too.

After figuring out what was causing the murders in this town, the brothers return home—Sam is adamant about not getting dragged along on a long quest to find their father; not when he has this important interview tomorrow morning. So he returns home to his girlfriend, only he finds… well, let’s just say he finds a reason to quickly join his brother again.

SUPERNATURAL is another McG show, although fellow filmmaker Eric Kripke and director David Nutter, whose reel includes episodes of SMALLVILLE, THE X-FILES, BAND OF BROTHERS and other quality shows, deserve as much or more credit for the look and feel of this show.

I don’t know… I liked it. It’s worth at least another look. So far, between this and last time’s MY NAME IS EARL, I feel satisfied with both shows. Can it be that this Fall will actually hold more pleasant surprises than past years? We’ll see…

Next Time: ABC's THE NIGHT STALKER