I refuse to believe that a relationship exists between a television show and its fandom anywhere else in the world like the one Supernatural has with its fans. A company exists to facilitate the unique alchemy that occurs when the Supernatural Family, as they are known, meet up every few weeks with the objects of their worship. There follow three days of highly structured interaction between the actors on a stage—accompanied by Louden Swain, an excellent band led by one of the actors, Rob Benedict, and MC’d by yet another actor, Richard Speight—as one star after the other is brought out to deafening cheers and are then put through their paces: chatting with fans, answering questions, interacting with the band and each other. Then that star is played off while another takes his place. The love and adoration rushing over the stage in deep, religious/erotic waves is heady and humbling at the same time.
By this time there is a compact between adoring and adored that has become as predictable and reassuring as a Catholic Mass, an appropriate choice of words, as Supernatural, with its mix of family, angels and demons—and God himself as a character—is a show that relies heavily on Christian tradition and biblical characters, without ever accepting any sort of Christian orthodoxy that would exclude any fans from partaking of the service. The strong LGBTQ presence at these conventions assures that, whatever trappings or traditions are absorbed from actual religions, there is always a sense that the people attending these services are there not just to adore and to be thanked and acknowledged for their constancy, but to heal themselves, to rejoin a community that relies on itself and its untouchable icons to fill the emptiness within themselves and the gaps within their own families and relationships, which have proved less reliable or fulfilling than the Church of Supernatural. Here, judgments are left at the door rather than regularly levied upon parishioners. There is music and laughter and the sharing of stories and parables. The men and women onstage will give talks about the importance of believing in oneself and the helping of others in the community and, most importantly, how here, within this community, in this place, they can feel safe and loved. Those who suffer from depression—an important element within the Supernatural community—take part in various charitable initiatives led by some of the actors themselves.
If this all seems a little heavy for what people might naturally assume is just another Comic-Con type of event, well, it is. I’ve been to many conventions of all sorts all over the country and in other countries as well, and there is simply nothing to compare to this. Books have been written about this fandom, as well as the usual exegesis about the Supernatural characters and world that are a regular and wonderful part of every fandom everywhere. But it isn’t entirely a religious experience. One component the Supernatural conventions have in common with others is that of sheer joy, and it is difficult to be in the midst of it without feeling it oneself. But almost as important, the sexual element is inescapable as the show features in its four stars men who are impossibly, devastatingly attractive to the fans who pack their ballrooms. The physical stress that the fans endure during the brief moments they are allowed to meet, talk with, touch or take pictures with Jared and Jensen or Misha or Mark Sheppard is palpable. At the end of a photo session with hundreds of palpitating women, these men return to their dressing rooms to strip off shirts literally drenched with the sweat of the Believers.
It is a Traveling Salvation Show that plays to hundreds of thousands of fans in hotels around the world. These conventions are expensive. The company that organizes this and other TV-related conventions is a profit-making enterprise. Many fans simply don’t have the money to afford even the least expensive of the tiered-priced tickets at the events. For those who can, even the most fleeting of contacts is worth every penny. And as a fan of many things myself, and as one who grew up in a time when this sort of artist-fan contact would’ve been unthinkable, I get it. If I could’ve met the heroes of my youth and adolescence—or adulthood, for that matter—in this kind of organized weekend, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. The differences between us notwithstanding, I see myself in them.
Unfortunately, most of them saw me as Metatron, the troll among far more attractive men, the forever unforgivable, most hated of the show’s numerous “Big Bads,” the smirking slaughterer of their most adored darlings. Thankfully, most fans are able to differentiate between actor and role, but even those who can make the distinction had little time for the Scribe of God. After Dean Winchester referred to Metatron in one episode as a “douchebag,” the Internet gleefully bestowed the nickname “Metadouche” on my character. It is a sobriquet that has become almost as ubiquitous as “Booger,” although always said with a lot less affection. For the four seasons that I appeared on Supernatural, the fans prayed for my extermination—and that it would be slow and painful.
I embraced it all. In my relatively few encounters with the Supernatural fandom en masse, I affected bewilderment as to why everyone should be so angry with a character who really wasn’t evil, per se, just misunderstood. I took to social media myself, posting funny, occasionally perverse posts, allegedly from Metatron to the fandom. These were almost always answered with a barrage of invective and hate, though the more thoughtful would include an added “Love U, tho, Curtis!” to let me know it was all in good fun.
And it mostly was. Then came what was to be my penultimate show as the character, though no one had told me that at the time. Titled “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” it was written by Robbie Thompson and directed by Robert Singer, and is now considered by some fans to be one of the best episodes of the show. Thompson created what was essentially a one-act, two-character play in which Metatron, down on his luck and desperate, is brought to an empty bar to meet with God, played by Rob Benedict, who has written his autobiography and needs his scribe’s help to punch it up. Metatron realizes that God, tired of his creations’ failings, is going to allow humanity to be destroyed by his sister, Amara. Metatron, once regarded as the most inhuman of villains, is given the extraordinary task of defending humanity in the face of an uncaring, unfeeling God.
It is a truly remarkable script and those days that Rob Benedict and I spent together were some of the most rewarding I have ever experienced anywhere—TV, film or stage. The episode was not just an extraordinarily vivid and complex discussion of some large issues, but it had the additional surprising effect when it aired of literally changing the fandom’s opinion of Metatron overnight. They had watched as the reviled Metadouche, in tears, had fought for them, pleaded for them. They realized that finally, in a totally unexpected twist, Metatron had become one of them. Perhaps he had been one of them all along. If we go far back enough in anyone’s story, we can find the moment that made them into the saint or the monster that they ultimately became. Metatron may have been no different. But it was too late, in any event. Having made the fandom, in spite of themselves, love and embrace Metatron, the writers killed him in the very next episode, “All in the Family,” in which the scribe sacrifices himself for the good of the universe.
Supernatural the TV show, as opposed to Supernatural the touring show, boasted some truly remarkable talent behind the scenes. With writers like Robbie Thompson, Nancy Won, Andrew Dabb, Jeremy Carver and Jenny Klein; directors like John Badham, Phil Sgriccia, and Thomas R. Wright; designers like Jerry Wanek; editors like Nicole Bayer; and the great cinematographer Serge Ladouceur with a top-notch camera crew, the show has creative talent to spare. The makeup, wardrobe and hair departments show continual invention (and re-invention). Care is taken by everyone. To name them all is impossible, but for an actor to be able to work with those people, and to be given those words to speak season after season, makes it difficult to imagine it not being fun. It was also work—sometimes remarkably hard work.
And yet there I was, in the center of it all, with Metatron as my splendid alter-ego, working in and sharing a popular spotlight with such evolved and generous actors. And despite their unfailing kindness and courtesy—or perhaps in a way, because of it—I never, from beginn
ing to end of my time on Supernatural became a part of it. I observed being on Supernatural. Even when being a guest at Supernatural conventions, I came away imagining what really being a part of those conventions would be like.
So, strangely enough, as a creature of fandom, as one who was present at the creation of modern fandom as we know it today, I, the most obsessive and giddy of superfans in my own right, found myself but tepidly welcomed by some of those organizing these events. It may have been just a matter of getting off on the wrong foot, I don’t know. But when I first showed up at a Supernatural convention in Chicago, I was never told that there were after-hours events at which the cast could perform for the fans. At another I was put alone in a separate room from the rest of the cast for an entire afternoon between events. Once I was told by the staff they were going to have to move me into a hallway to sign autographs because I wasn’t doing it fast enough. In this case, it was a question of me not understanding the rules. I was accustomed to conventions where I could engage with people one-on-one while signing. I had never gotten complaints before but this kind of interaction at a Supernatural convention was, due to the sheer volume of people, not possible. I just hadn’t known. But it was an awkward situation and I felt it. After three conventions in the U.S. the phone stopped ringing and my relationship with the Supernatural conventions discreetly ended.
“It isn’t that they don’t want you,” one of my castmates told me later. “They just don’t need you.”
Because I was not on the road with the cast, I found myself by the end of my final season on the show about as close to them all as I had been the first day. I had been told at one point by Misha Collins that attending the conventions was really how everyone became friends on the show. When filming in Vancouver, there just isn’t time. Being cut out of the conventions meant that kind of interaction was lost to me, which made me sad. Most actors are, I think, social creatures and crave support and community as much as anyone. We tend to be nomadic and travel in herds, whether it’s touring a play or on location for a film. To see a clan as close personally as the Supernatural cast is was a beautiful thing, but it was one Eden, to use another biblical analogy, that I found myself cast out of forever.
Of course, by that time, I was a man in my early sixties who had been acting for decades. This sense of being considered disposable wasn’t unknown to me, either as an actor or a nerd.
It was just a strange thing, after all these years, to feel like I was back at the Spazz Table again.
KING OF THE NERDS
LOS ANGELES, 2013–2016
When Robert Carradine and I would get together for dinner from time to time, the conversation would inevitably turn to two subjects: Nerds and Money. I tended to focus on the nerds, while Robert obsessed about the money, in a way a man with two children on the cusp of entering college tends to do.
Over the years, we had seen Revenge of the Nerds only grow in both influence and popularity. We had been invited—separately and together—to be guests at various screenings around the country, after which we’d do question-and-answer panels. I was always struck at these events, and from even just talking with strangers on the street, how much the movie meant to people when they were young and still struggling with their nerd identity. The subtext of Revenge of the Nerds was not lost on any of these people. Bullying and oppression are universal scourges, more so today than ever, and that fact was an essential part of the nerd legend. Over the course of the four movies, blacks, gays, Jews, women, Asians, Kurds and Sikhs were all represented in the Tri Lamb house.
The universality of the connection always struck me, too, when I would be approached by some white, middle-aged jock who wanted to talk about the effect that Revenge of the Nerds had on him. There he’d be, all muscle-bound and buzz-cut—the kind of guy who, at the frat house, would’ve been nicknamed “Crusher”—getting all misty-eyed about how important the movie was, because it was his story. He’d been picked on when he was young and seeing Nerds made him realize there were others like him. And I’d be listening to him and thinking, “You fucker! People like you beat up people like me!”
But with age comes experience and with experience comes wisdom, or what passes for wisdom in my case, and over time I’ve realized that this guy was probably telling the truth: his truth. He may have been the most vulnerable jock in the house—someone had to be—so the bigger jocks picked on him. Which made him pick on the nerds even more. In this game, someone is always dealt the low card. Who am I to judge?
But even Robert, a former nerd abuser himself, could see the influence our little movie was still having on people of multiple generations, and, being Robert, he figured there had to be a way we could cash in on that. Obviously a feature or TV movie was out of the question. A feature “reboot” had been attempted at one point and was apparently so bad that 20th Century Fox actually pulled the plug on it while they were filming. A sequel with the original nerds at our age would just be an embarrassment for everyone. But during one dinner, Robert came at the thing from another angle.
“You know what’s killing us, man?” he said, leaning across the table, his glittering eye fixing mine like he was the Ancient Mariner. “It’s that reality shit!” This was a common lament for actors and writers at the time who were seeing networks throwing huge chunks of prime time over to these insipid creations. “But ya know what? Can’t beat ’em, join ’em! What we need to do is create one ourselves! Base it on Nerds! That’s where the money is, man.”
It would be nice to say, “So, that’s what we did!” The actual process, though, took about seven years. We would start talking about it and then get jobs and drift apart for a few months or a year, and then have another dinner and the whole procedure would begin again. Neither of us had ever produced a reality show or any sort of show, though Robert had some experience with production on the later Nerds films. We didn’t even know what, in those days, would constitute a pitch for something like this. We came up with an overall approach and somehow wrangled a meeting with one of the prominent reality show houses at the time. Their subsequent offer was so discouraging that we dropped the idea for another couple of years.
But after numerous twists, turns and disappointments, we wound up with Ben Silverman and Jimmy Fox (Electus) and Craig Armstrong and Rick Ringbakk (5×5 Media). Armstrong (no relation) and Silverman were the nerds, with Ringbakk serving as a kind of jock ballast. We pitched the show to TBS, at that time the home to reruns of The Big Bang Theory and not much else; they bought it and they mainly left us alone for three seasons.
* * *
Armstrong and Ringbakk gently but firmly moved Robert and me through the thickets of development. Fortunately, Robert and I had no passionate commitment to any of the ideas that we had brought to 5×5, because most of them were jettisoned entirely, or drastically reworked. It was essential that any direct connection with Revenge of the Nerds be avoided, as Fox was uninterested in leasing any rights to the original film or characters.
Finally, the three ideas that we brought to the table that did become part of the show were that there be a “nerd house” (Nerdvana, as it was dubbed by someone), that there be approximate gender parity among the cast, and that philosophically, the show, in whatever form it took, would never mock nerds.
The show (King of the Nerds, as it was named by someone) was to be a celebration of all aspects of nerd culture and I made myself kind of a bore on the subject. Over the three seasons that the show was in production, whenever I felt instinctively that the tone was off, I would remind everyone to get out the Revenge of the Nerds DVD and run through the pep rally scene at the end of the film. That, I would say, is the spirit of this show and we must never veer from it.
Everyone was very patient, and to give our producing partners all their due, they really made every attempt to stick to the nerd ideal. Hunter Thompson once said about the medium, “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is perceived by some as a kind of cruel and shallow money trench … a long
plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.” In my experience, that’s a fair assessment but in the main the people we worked with were of a different breed. We were never deliberately cruel, there were certainly no actual thieves or pimps on the payroll, and by television standards the money trench idea is laughable. We noted every mistake made during the season and attempted to fix it in the subsequent one. We weren’t perfect, but we tried.
The idea went like this: Comb the continent for eleven top-notch, geeky nerds, from all areas of the culture, and put them in a house. Allow them to pick opposing teams. Every week, the episode would begin with a Nerd War, a team-against-team battle royale focusing on some aspect of the nerd world: cosplay, robot building, debate, etc. Then, two members of the losing team—one picked by the winning team and one picked by the losing team—would enter the Nerd-Off. This could involve a massive chess game, or dance-off, or superhero trivia competition. The loser of the Nerd-Off would be banished from Nerdvana until the final episode, when only two nerds remained. Then all the banished nerds returned and picked a nerd to support in the final Nerd-Off, which would determine who would sit upon the fabled Throne of Games, win $100,000 and be crowned King of the Nerds.
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