Adam Glass is Leaving Supernatural
When the official press release came out for Supernatural Season 11 at the upfronts on May 14th, there was something missing. A name on the Executive Producer’s list that we had been used to seeing the last few seasons, Adam Glass. This heightened already existing rumors about his depature since the last episode he wrote was “About A Boy,” episode 12 of season ten.
Well, now it’s official. Adam Glass has confirmed on his Twitter he is leaving the show. He will be working on the new Criminal Minds Spinoff for CBS as Executive Producer. We’re sorry to see him go, but it’s hard for a writer to turn down a big opportunity to start with a new series on a much bigger network.
@AdamGlass44 But it is time 2 move on and go back to what I was b4 I started writing on the show. A FAN. So, this is not goodbye, because #SPN is family
@AdamGlass44 I’m the new EP on the #criminalminds spinoff #beyondborders So, I’m still in the monster business. And always with #SPN until the end.
We wish you the best of luck Adam and thanks for your support of the show and the fans over the last four years. Those of us at the WFB and the entire SPN Family will be rooting for you and your continued success.

Alice Jester is the founder, editor-in-chief, head writer, programmer, web designer, site administrator, marketer, and moderator for The Winchester Family Business. She is a 30 year IT applications and database expert with a penchant for creative and freelance writing in her spare (ha!!) time. That’s on top of being a wife, mother of two active kids, and four loving (aka needy) pets.
I liked most of his episodes and I am sorry he is leaving the show. Sounds like he got an offer he couldn’t refuse. Good luck Adam I wish you nothing but success.
I have liked his episodes and “About a boy” was hilarious and a good episode to be his last one. I wish him well on this new path he is taking.
– Lilah
I have mixed emotions about this. He’s written some of my favorite episodes of the last few years (including “Sharp Teeth”, which I understand not everyone loved) and he brought a very personal voice to his scripts, which I’ll be sad to see go.
On the other hand, Carver has been very conservative about changing the writing staff. Robert Berens is the only newcomer he’s brought on. Supernatural could use some new blood, and I guess someone leaving was the only way it would happen. Too bad it was Glass, though. I hope that the rookie is good, and that if the show runs long enough Adam might contribute again.
Sorry to see him go. Wouldn’t it be great if they could lure back one of the writers we loved from previous seasons? Ben Edlund would be my first choice. Or Cathryn Humphries.
Either would be cool. He wrote “My Bloody Valentine” and she wrote “Sex and Violence” and those are two of my favorite episodes.
I think of Cathryn Humphries coming back to SPN all the damn time! Her and Julie Siege (I hope I spelled that correctly). They wrote with a lot of heart.
This is going to sound mean, but I am going to go out on a limb here at say exactly how I feel about this. I am not sad to see AG go at all. HIs episodes were mediocre at best, and canon and Sam trashing at worst. Adam Glass is the biggest offender when it comes to fantasy self insertion. He’s an avowed Dean fan and while that is not a problem in and of itself, he has zero problem making Sam look stupid or having him say ridiculous things like “You pulled a Dean Winchester!” to prop up his hero. Canon is in mortal danger under Glass and he’s made clumsy and ignorant errors (No, there isn’t a nine year age difference between Sam and Dean).
[b]His episodes: (these are only a select few)[/b]
All Dogs Go To Heaven – or Lucky the pervert man/dog who watches his owner undress…
Like a Virgin – virgin’s who aren’t vergins, the mother of all and dragons….
Mommy Dearest – lackluster dispatching of a lackluster villain in the mother of all. Sam is superfluous…
Defending Your Life – Ugh! Sam is a rotten lawyer; Dean makes out with dead, ghost Jo….
Adventures in Babysitting – the introduction of the much loathed (by me anyway) Dean Jr. = Krissy…..
Southern Comfort – Dean says mean things and gets a pass….
Freaks and Geeks – More Krissy, nuff said…..
Bad Boys- Dean Winchester’s childhood is completely rewritten to resemble Sam’s. Sam is suddenly nine years younger than Dean and a moron….
Sharp Teeth – The episode where Sam’s words became the bigger crime than Dean’s actions…..
About a Boy – AG continues to rewrite Dean’s childhood and inserts himself shamelessly into the narrative….
There are a few other episodes that were boring but didn’t arouse open hostility in me. Mostly they were largely forgettable. If send AG on his way means possibly getting another writer like Robert Berens then I am ALL for it.
Eh, Im not too upset to see him go. More hits than misses. What concerns me is what if they dont replace him and just increase the eps the other writers are responsible for. And who is going to be the new head writer? Robbie Thompson? Gawd no!!! Please no. Kinda wish Adam would take him and the Nep Duo as well. Love to see Show bring a strong new writer on board but with it being in its final years would it be easy to draw new talent? If Adams gone does that mean no more Krissy? Please, say yes. Please, please, please.
Robbie Thompson has given us some great episodes. Slash Fiction, Time after Time, Goodbye Stranger, First Born, Book of the Damned, Fan Fiction. I know that you don’t care for Charlie but many fans do. Evidently the only other time that Jensen went to the bosses was when he read the script where Charlie was killed. He thought that was BS. They were fun episodes for many fans. I think if he is the head writer it wouldn’t be the end of the world and if he wrote more episodes it wouldn’t end the show. The only other choice would be Eugenie.
I agree. While I did not enjoy any of the Charlie episodes except the first, I really did like some of his episodes, including many of the ones you mentioned. What ruined some of his episodes for me was that his pro-Dean bias was too evident. The one thing that diminished my enjoyment of Fan Fiction is that it focused on Dean much more so than Sam. When he actually made the effort to include Sam significantly in the plots, I liked how he wrote Sam.
So … I’m the only one to like Krissy?
Of all season 6-10 new characters introduced to the show, she was the only one I actually liked [i](outside of the female Campbell cousin, Gwen)[/i], and the least used. Of all the potential hunters, she’s the only one that actually makes sense. Familiar, in some sense, to the world and lifestyle before her first kill – and later trained with others, without going out on her own and becoming super-ninja because she read books.
You LIKE Krissy?!?!
[video]http://i.imgur.com/KqtpF.gif[/video]
Crap. Tried to upload a .gif in true Russ fashion, but I guess I don’t know how….
[img]http://i.imgur.com/KqtpF.gif[/img]
A-HAH! Et Voila!
Good one E! Sorry Russ, but I despised Krissy so I think E’s vid expresses my feelings perfectly. I found the character annoying, and in true AG fashion she naturally thought Dean was the cat’s pajamas. I hope she returns to the show just so they can kill her off. I’ll take Clair over Krissy any day- not that I really want Clair to return.
Claire? A whiny teen that becomes an uber-hunter overnight, doused with terrible acting?
Oh, I have the perfect Gif for you …
[img]http://i.imgur.com/KqtpF.gif[/img]
Touche! But I didn’t loathe her in her last appearance on the show, whereas Krissy was like nails on a blackboard every time she opened her mouth.
Russ, I had one more thing I wanted to add:
[img]http://media.giphy.com/media/QBjH0bEtlZheg/giphy.gif[/img]
Furthermore:
[img]http://www.sharegif.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/yes-gif-9.gif[/img]
Unlike Garth, Charlie, Donna, Rudy, Abaddon – she was one of the very few that wasn’t written as a caricature, or a one-dimensional cardboard cutout.
No, just an über confident, über efficient hunter girl with skills beyond her years and training with a big mouth. She was ANNOYING in the extreme.
For me Krissy wasn’t the main reason I had a problem with the Krissy episodes. The actress did a pretty good job of ‘being Krissy’.
The problem at this stage here are now WAY too many uber-teenager episodes on the show, and since the episode invariably involves said teenager needing to get around Sam’s unconscious/tied-up body at some point in the episode to improbably save the day, while being oh-so-adorably full of sass, and playing mini-golf with Dean I am (rightly, I feel) unimpressed by every single last wish-fulfillment-personal-insertion-into-the-episode-by-the-writers one of them…
Can we have a moratorium on sassy teenagers next season please Show?
If canon means anything, Dean was far more of an efficient hunter at her age, and he’s the biggest mouth on the show. In After School Special, a tiny 13 year old Sam was able to beat the shit out of a dude twice his size. There’s nothing wrong with a teen being a smart-arse (they all are), and being semi-competent, so long as their back story makes it believable. Krissy’s, just like Sam and Dean’s, makes it believable.
Krissy saw her mother get killed by something supernatural, and learned how to live and survive the hunters lifestyle through her father, without making a kill until Adventuress in Babysitting.
Krissy works in the Supernatural universe. None of her back-story was forced or heavy handed; her toughness and attitude came from years of living on the road with her Dad, spending many hours alone and taking care of herself (and taking care of her father half the time); her actual after first-kill hunting skills were taught and honed within a group, by an experienced hunter (Victor), over a believable period of time.
She and her 2 hunter friends, are the only believable hunters that have been introduced in the post-Kripke Supernatural. The only ones.
With the exception that I thought Krissy wasn’t supposed to have been involved in hunting until after AiBS I agree with you. She is the most logical of the mini-hunters. And even at that, by the logic of episodes earlier in the show, she should have been toast already.
Dean tells Sam in one episode, where Sam has been out of hunting for. like 1/2 an episode or something, that he is likely ‘rusty’ and they need to ease back into working together (I think it is ‘free to be you and me’, maybe?) And don’t even get me started on the whole Jo thing – she actually HAD hunter training …. But we are supposed to be believe in all these kids still being alive and working on their own.
Sam and Dean were ‘raised like warriors’ and they all had to live a life on the road. Either being a hunter is tough or it isn’t, it can’t really be both.
No more teenagers hunting on their own. If Sam and Dean can’t make it through more than a few episodes at a time without getting themselves killed the teenagers actively acting as hunters just remove any vestiges of believability in the basic premise of the show.
Again, within the base logic of the SPN universe, Krissy and her crew still make sense. They were trained by a hunter, they hunt in a group, and don’t hunt outside of their area. Plus they’re only hunting freshly turned vamps and low-level stuff.
They’re not single-handedly winning a war in Oz, and crisscrossing the world avoiding detection from the biggest/baddest evil family from the past couple of centuries. That’s the nonsense I want stamped out of this show.
Jo was competent, but died fighting Demons and Hell-hounds, whilst trying to take down Lucifer. Death was a highly likely outcome for anyone involved in that particular skirmish.
Actually I meant that Jo was by current standards (and even at the time) a competent hunter. AND she got into hunting-related trouble. Like you say, it all meant that she fit into the SPN universe logic.
The Krissy episodes annoy me for other reasons than the ‘teenage hunters’ stuff. I would like for there to be room for new writers who GET the fundamentals of the show and are not so inclined to rearrange the rules to suit their stories as some of the current ones are.
I really liked Garth. I found him sweet and funny. And I loved the reveal that he was a dentist and participated in Civil War reenactments. However, I was not a fan of him becoming a werewolf- dumb, dumb, dumb. I also loved Abaddon. I thought she was evil and funny and I loved that she had no redeeming qualities. However, I agree about Charlie and Rudy, and I saw absolutely no need to bring Donna back. I don’t think she was interesting enough, or that her character really made sense.
WHAT? NO. NO NO NO. Too typical know it all bratty teen. Predictably written, stereotypical teen.
True… even more episodes written by the nepotism duo? Ugh… at least they treat Sam like a human being.
[quote]Bad Boys- Dean Winchester’s childhood is completely rewritten to resemble Sam’s. Sam is suddenly nine years younger than Dean and a moron….
Sharp Teeth – The episode where Sam’s words became the bigger crime than Dean’s actions…..[/quote]
These are two of my most disliked episodes ever. I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about them…:p
I’m not so sorry to see him go either. He’s one of my least favourite writers, along with Robbie Thompson (although I did like Book Of The Damned. ) Hopefully they’ll find someone new with the writing calibre of Robert Berens. If only I could win the Lottery, then I’d pay Sera whatever she wanted to come back…
Me too! I loved her episodes. She had great depth and versatility as a writer and treated BOTH brothers with respect.
While overall I am not a fan of AG, I actually quite enjoyed a few of the eps you mentioned. I really liked the brother interactions and conversations in Like A Virgin, especially when Sam first woke up after having his soul restored. I also enjoyed the Sam/Cas conversation, and I thought Dean trying to pull the sword out of the rock was hilarious. I really liked Southern Comfort, and I thought for once Sam didn’t give Dean a pass- I loved how he tore into Dean at the end, and Dean kind of backed down. Finally, while All Dogs Go to Heaven was not great, I thought the conversation at the end where Sam told Dean how he really felt without his soul was excellent. I do agree that the others you mention varied from horrible (the Krissy episodes and Bad Boys) to dull and run of the mill.
In Southern Comfort the show gave Dean a pass. Sam was vilified for calling Dean out and he’s still being punished for what he said to this day. AG has a terrible habit of making Sam harsh in the extreme when he tries to defend himself (Sharp Teeth) especially to Dean thus making him look like the bigger monster.
I guess I viewed the Southern Comfort scene differently than you. Sam’s speech to Dean, while angry and vehement, seemed perfectly reasonable and was limited to the situation at hand- Dean had to stop crucifying Sam for not looking for him or Sam was outta there. And I read Dean’s subdued response to that as his concession that Sam had a point. I don’t think Dean ever brought that speech up again. I never read reviews or comments about that episode, but IMO the only way you could vilify Sam for that speech is if you are a Sam-hater who is overly protective of poor Dean’s wittle feelings. Sam’s comments just seemed like a very different beast than the atrocious speech in Sharp Teeth.
The episodes you listed were not my favourites.. yikes! Can’t say he was my favourite 🙁
Of course best wishes to Adam Glass. I was not a fan of his writing but who knows if it was his fault or the heavy hand of Robert Singer who I hope is the next name to disappear from the show EP staff. Hopefully Glass will not be the only departure from what is an already anemic writing room in terms of talent and turning out great episodes. I would really love to see Raelle Tucker come back but that’s proabably a pipe dream and Edlund to but he is working on Gotham.
Raelle Tucker, Ben Edlund, Sera Gamble and Eric Kripke should write 1 last episode before the show ends.
NOLANOLA – I love that idea. WOW. That would really get me excited. If David Nutter could direct a few final episodes as well that would all be perfect.
I’m sad to see Adam leave because he was passionate about working on Supernatural and creatively he gave us the Men of Letters, Henry, Josie and Abbadon! I love his and Robbie’s bromance and I guess what makes me the saddest, is how the business aspect of the industry always trumps the creative love for the job. I can’t fault him for wanting to move up in the world, it’s not my place to guide his career, but in my eyes being Executive Producer and writer on Supernatural IS the height of all success! He famously vowed that Supernatural was his dream job and he would never leave until they closed down production. (On a side note, we are blessed that Jared and Jensen are happy and committed to playing Sam and Dean even though many other opportunites would be out there for them if they chose to move on.)
I follow Jeff Lieber on Twitter (Showrunner of NCIS New Orleans) who gives terrific advice to writers and helps explain the mechanics of running a show. One of his most insightful responses to me was how writers ALWAYS want to be Showrunners and yet the skill set to be successful at it isn’t always there. Regardless there will always be offers because they need new Showrunners. IMHO Kripke is the one guy on Supernatural who had the skill, vision and positive outcome to be both a wonderful writer and an amazing Showrunner! Personally, I think both Sera and Jeremy were best as writers. I think being new and enthused goes a long way on Supernatural in whipping up amazing, exciting, and innovative scripts that blow us away. Being Showrunner is not as creative, it is taking care of business, and it seems the creative vision suffers.
I agree we need new blood in the writers room, someone determined to prove themselves by writing that brilliantly crafted script that leaves their mark on Supernatural in a positive way. I miss Kripke, John Shiban, Raelle Tucker, Sera Gamble, Cathryn Humphries, and Ben Edlund in the writers room writing the hell out of scripts AND capturing the essence of who these characters are! I miss Kripke expecting more from his writers, insisting things track and fit in the Supernatural universe. I don’t want any more nepotism and choosing writers because they know them or like them on a personal level, I want the best and brightest in the writers room. Kripke would have demanded it!
Kripke was very lucky to have gotten the writers he had. He also had Singer and Kim Manners with an initial assist from David Nutter to help him realize his vision. It’s too bad that Carver wasn’t given that same opportunity. I hope that Adam Glass leaving means that Berens and Thompson will write more episodes and if they do hire another writer it will be someone who is either enthusiastic about the show (in other words has seen it or been a fan from day 1) or someone from the past that is the quality of the best writers in the series. However I’m not going to hold my breath. I doubt that the network is going to dish out more money on an aging show with failing ratings. They may just stand pat.
I would love if they filled the void with more Carver episodes. I’ve loved all of his episodes except Do You Believe in Miracles. But I forgive him for that one because of Brothers Keeper.
I think they’ll have to hire another writer. More than anything, time will be a factor. Everyone does at least 2 episodes a season, with some doing 3 or even 4. Putting those 2 or 3 open episodes into the lap of current writers might be stretching the lines a little thin.
Anyone know what sort of time-lines these writers have, from “you write this episode” until handing in their first draft?
Depends on the amount of forethought given to an OUTLINE, ”PAGE” to ”CAN” 6 weeks.