Book Review: Supernatural: The Official Companion Season Six
Supernatural: The Official Companion Season Six
Genre(s): TV tie-in
Publisher: Titan Books
Description: This official companion is packed with exclusive interviews, photos, behind-the-scenes secrets, the low-down on the show’s supernatural entities, and a complete episode guide. Plus a color portrait gallery of the stars!
Availability: Paperback
There are a lot of different levels to liking a TV show. There’s the level where you like to watch it when it’s on but don’t really care otherwise, which I personally call the “How I Met Your Mother level.” There’s the level where you make it appointment viewing. There’s the level where you spend a bunch of money on the DVDs. Then, somewhere just short of the level where one starts writing fanfiction, there’s the level where one buys the “Companion” book of the series. These books generally spend a lot of time describing what you already saw happen.
As far as these books go, Supernatural: The Official Companion Season Six is probably a pretty good one. It skips past actually describing what happened on the show and moves on to DVD-commentary-style bits from various crew members for each episode. This is a good thing, since in my opinion season six of the show was, um, shaky, though it had a lot of fun bits. For those who aren’t in the know, the show features two brothers from Middle America who drive around the country fighting monsters and listening to metal music — though the monsters have been partially subsumed over the years by a burgeoning war between angels and demons. Then again, if you don’t know that, you should not buy this book. Period. (That’s “full stop,” for British people.)
Other than the episode recaps, the book also includes some “up close and personal” sections on the various monsters the brothers fight. There are also some very self-congratulatory prefaces, essays, etc. from various crew members, and some very nice glossy pictures of the Winchester brothers putting on their best serious faces for the camera. If you’re in to that sort of thing. And who isn’t, really?
From the perspective of a TV fan, it can be interesting to break down any season of TV, no matter how good it actually was. The book would be better if it had more compelling insights to offer. However, there are a lot of paragraphs devoted to the guy who wrote the music saying “yeah, I’m wasn’t really thinking anything when I did that, it just sounded cool.” Or the hair people talking about how they let Dean’s hair down slightly to show his angst or something. We’re not talking about the episode director dissecting the camera angles here.
Look, are you a Supernatural fan? You should probably just watch the series. But if you have disposable time and/or income, and the commentaries on the DVDs just aren’t enough for you, then yeah, it’s probably up your alley. It also might work for you if you like piercing glossy stares. That’s a pretty major demographic right there.
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