Oooh! Interesting question!

I’m of the opinion that all TV is thoroughly interesting sociologically (but maybe I’m just trying to justify my love of Jersey Shore), but I can see why people might point to Supernatural particularly.

The show deals with A LOT OF STUFF. You have this core theme of familial relationships (Brothers and absent fathers and surrogate fathers and father figures particularly); You have this issue of gender in that the show is HUGELY androcentric - So many female characters are killed in such a fucking short space of time (which is infuriating because Mary and Jess and Ruby and Meg and Ellen and Jo and Eve and so many more were all flawless and quite three-dimensional characters); There’s a hugely invested and close knit and ferocious Fandom that is heavily involved in debating and reworking and interacting with the canon; Leading of from that you have so much homoerotic and homoromantic subtext that it makes me cry on a daily basis; You have issues and ideas of family breakdown, of death, of criminality, of justice; There’s so much lore and myth and legend (another whole area that Sociology looks at in its own right); There’s the idea of religion and gods (I love the shows take on this); Ideas about the human soul (which I think the show dealt with so fucking badly); You have a truck load of meta, or pop cultural references, of in-jokes and fan service (all of which I find particularly interesting from a Sociological perspective!).

I’ve probably missed a ton of things!! (And if anyone can thing of any more, throw them my way!) I would love to see a book or a series of essays just examining Supernatural through such a lense.

I would tell you to watch the whole damn thing (although, if you want to save yourself a lot of heartache, pretend that ‘the whole damn thing’ means ‘up to BUT NEVER BEYOND the last 30 seconds of season 5’), but you get a lot of variation on which of those 5 seasons is the best (my preference is for 4 and 5). There’s too many overarching story lines and themes for you to just watch one episode…

Anyone got anything to add?