Why does Supernatural season 14 have only 20 episodes?

We know that there has been a big question out there regarding Supernatural season 14 and its episode count of just 20 — the shortest that the series has had for a non-writers strike season. Luckily, we’ve now got an official answer.

Speaking to TVLine while at San Diego Comic-Con this year, series star Jensen Ackles confirmed that the shorter order has everything to do with giving himself and co-star Jared Padalecki a little more time away from the show every year: “Shaving a couple of episodes off gives us almost a extra month out of our year, which when you only get about a two-and-half-month hiatus, it goes really quickly.”

Given that we are in the fourteenth season of the series at this point, and Jared and Jensen’s kids are getting older, this obviously makes a good bit of sense. Supernatural is a very demanding job, rewarding as it is, and you want to try and take advantage of however much family time you possible can. If reducing the episode count slightly helps everyone to be interested in doing the show longer, we’re more than game for that. We wouldn’t even mind if the episode count went down even further so long as it meant that we continued to have future seasons. For now, though, that’s an issue to cross when we get around to it.

With shows that are earlier on in their runs and are considered hits (think The Flash), we don’t tend to think all that much about the long-term future since contractually, you are almost guaranteed a certain amount of time more with many of the actors. However, once you get past the season 10 mark you have to start thinking of things a little more year by year. We’ll see some of what happens when it comes to Supernatural season 14 and come early next year, we’ll start to hear more in terms of season 15. We don’t get the indication that this is going to be the final season for the show, so we’re at least reasonably optimistic now when it comes to the future. The ratings are still great and because of that, we’re confident the series will be able to last a little while longer.

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