It’s the end of an era. Not only is Supernatural the show over, having aired its finale in 2020, but now Monster of the Week — a weekly “creepy but necessary” podcast covering each and every episode of The CW series — has reached the end of its regular run as well.
Hopefully, fans will hear more Supernatural related talk from MOTW’s hosts, Chris Mosher and Jeremy Greer, on special occasions in the future. But, for now, regular Thursday releases have drawn to a close.
A moment of silence for fans, please. There are only so many endings one fandom can take during a pandemic!
There are many pop culture podcasts out there, accounting for every taste and opinion on almost every kind of media imaginable. Supernatural especially, with its long run and worldwide audience, has spawned quite a few of them. MOTW achieved something pretty impressive in relation to many of its peers, though: in February 2022, MOTW released “Non Consensual Pluck,” a reaction to the last episode of Supernatural season 15—meaning that MOTW had finally covered every episode aired during the show’s decade and a half long run. As far as the hosts, their devoted fans, and extensive internet research can ascertain, and without any evidence to the contrary, MOTW is the first podcast to have managed the sizable feat.
Even more remarkable than the runtime of the podcast is its sheer popularity among fans of the show. On Apple Podcasts, MOTW is currently tied for the highest-rated Supernatural podcast with Supernatural Then and Now, a podcast hosted by Rob Benedict (Chuck Shurley/God) and Richard Speight Jr. (Gabriel) from the cast of Supernatural itself. Not bad going for a podcast hosted by two guys who didn’t even interact with the wider fandom of the show before they launched it!
To commemorate Chris and Jeremy’s achievements with MOTW, they talked with Nerds and Beyond about their beginnings, their jokes, and what they have coming up next.
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Note: This interview was edited for clarity.
Nerds & Beyond: First of all, I have to congratulate you on making it all the way to the end of the show, and then take you right back to the beginning and ask you when you started watching Supernatural and what drew you to it in the first place, as viewers?
Chris: I think just the premise! I’m a big horror fan, and Supernatural just appealed to the side of me that likes those things, it’s a horror show about two dudes fighting demons, hunting ghosts—what could be cooler? I was a teenager when I started watching it, my best friend got me into it. We weren’t cool, hunky guys but when we were watching Supernatural we could kind of feel like we were, and live vicariously through them. I honestly didn’t realize some of this until we recorded our finale episode, but it was a tough time in my life going from high school to college and Supernatural became something I could rely on and come back to. It was comforting but it was also just kick-ass, it had awesome characters and storylines and monsters and everything I liked.
Jeremy: I was there day one, I would watch with my wife — it was appointment viewing every week! I think what drew me to it was probably the same as Chris, you had the two hunky guys hunting vampires and the Americana kind of vibe, and all the classic rock going on. It was just cool — at the time, I think it seemed like a modern version of The X-Files without any aliens.
Nerds & Beyond: So how did you go from separate, general audience fans to hosting such a beloved podcast?
Jeremy: We had a DM!
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Chris: We did! On my old show, my co-host said we should start a Supernatural podcast, but he was completely kidding and did not want to do that. But Jeremy heard that and was like, “Hey man, what’s up? You like that show too? Maybe we should talk about it.” I’d mostly been kidding about the podcast, but before we knew it we’d picked out a name and talked ourselves into doing it. And here we are 5 years later!
Jeremy: I mean, yeah, that’s it. I think the first episode, you can kind of tell when you listen to it that we were just like, “This is a goofy thing that we’re doing!” It’s crazy to think how seriously we came to take the show—and that kind of came naturally as we watched because we wanted to do a good job by this thing that we genuinely like a lot.
Nerds & Beyond: And now you have hundreds of episodes and a dedicated fanbase, all from that. How does it feel to get the feedback that you do now, compared to when you first started?
Chris: It’s really gratifying. Recently people wrote in for our finale coverage. To have people talk about things that we said five years ago and to be able to track how much we’ve changed even just in relation to our opinions on Supernatural, it’s really cool because I don’t think we would have realized it without that feedback.
Jeremy: Yeah. Just seeing the numbers start to elevate, seeing people starting to talk about us on random social media sites, live chatting about the episodes as we released them—that level of feedback you get as more and more people start listening is intense.
Chris: When we started out, we knew other people from our online communities, and it felt like that was our audience: people who knew us. As it started to build, suddenly there were people talking about us in places we had never looked before—there was a whole thing going on with Tumblr that we never even realized. We started seeing the numbers go up and we were like, “Holy crap, people are actually listening!”
Nerds & Beyond: And now you even have your own in-jokes about everything from characters not knowing how pregnancy works to Richard Speight…
Chris: [laughs] To set the record straight on the Richard Speight thing—sometimes we got it right, sometimes we got it wrong. Sometimes it was Speight, sometimes it was Spite. People would correct us, and we got so in our heads about it that even when we said it right, we weren’t sure. And then even when we’d settled on it and knew it was Speight, we continued to keep saying it wrong because that was just the joke at that point, and that’s who we are as people…
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Jeremy: One of the best things you can do as a podcaster is purposely mispronounce things to annoy people. [laughs] It’s a lot of fun. It just became a running joke. We did the same thing with Rowena — I called her Welsh or Irish or something, just picked a different accent for her every time. And one thing I really appreciate about Chris as a co-host is that he is willing to just run with me on a joke for as long as I care to take it.
Chris: Well, Jeremy, you’re the same, otherwise it wouldn’t work! The best thing about these jokes is that we make them and then we move on, talk about something else, and forget about them. Then they go out there to a wider audience and they bring them back to us, and we’re like. “Wait, what, a lizard with a—I said that?!”
Nerds & Beyond: So, now that Supernatural is over, can you share what’s next?
Jeremy: We can! We’re launching a new podcast covering BBC’s Merlin, called Still His Kingdom Keeps, where we’ll be doing the exact same thing as with MOTW and going episode by episode. We’ve recorded a few already, and it’s wild going from how intense and dramatic season 15 of Supernatural is to how bright and easy and loose Merlin season 1 is. It’s just about some goofy kids who all want to flirt with each other, it’s awesome.
Chris: We talked a lot for years about what we wanted to do after Supernatural because we knew we didn’t want to stop talking to each other on a podcast. Two years ago, I hadn’t even heard of Merlin, but I found it on Netflix and it reminded me of the way I feel about Supernatural. It’s a different vibe, but there was something about it. And it seems like a lot of our community are into the show too. I don’t think it’s what anyone expected, but it seems like the perfect fit.
Jeremy: For MOTW, we’ll be keeping that as our Supernatural base of operations. We’ve got some ideas for some bonus content, some interviews, and when The Winchesters come out we’ll cover that as well.
Chris and Jeremy’s new podcast Still His Kingdom Keeps will be available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and most other podcast platforms.
