Supernatural Spinoff The Winchesters Is a Hit, Becomes The CW's Most Watched Premiere This Season

The CW's Supernatural prequel series The Winchesters debuted on Tuesday night, and it was a big premiere for the network. According to final numbers from Nielsen (via TVLine), the spinoff brought in 781,000 viewers — a number that makes The Winchesters the network's most-watched season premiere this fall. These numbers also make The Winchesters the network's most-watched telecast for the same time slot since June 28th of this year — the Season 2 finale of Superman & Lois.

This is a pretty promising start for The Winchesters, a series that has been eagerly anticipated by man fans of the network's wildly popular Supernatural and it seems like there are a lot more exciting things to come for viewers to tune into that may well continue to drive ratings. Over the weekend at New York Comic Con, it was announced that Smallville alum Tom Welling has joined the series cast. Welling is set to play the role of Samuel Campbell, father of Mary (Meg Donnelly) and grandfather of Mary and John Winchester's sons, Sam and Dean. The character was originally portrayed on Supernatural by Mitch Pileggi.

What is The Winchesters about?

According to the series' official description, "Before Sam and Dean, there was John and Mary. Told from the perspective of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), The Winchesters is the epic, untold love story of how John met Mary and how they put it all on the line not only to save their love, but the entire world." The series is set to dive into the couple's origin story and will be narrated by Dean.

How does The Winchesters fit into established Supernatural canon?

According to Ackles, canon that was already established with John and Mary in Supernatural — particularly their lineage as members of the Men of Letters and a family of monster hunters — will be navigated in a unique way in the prequel series.

"That's kind of the exciting thing, in my opinion, is that the waypoints or the tentpoles that were established on the mothership, as we lovingly call it, those will get touched on," Ackles previously said. "But we'll get to those waypoints in a way that we probably didn't expect. And that's what we're really having fun with is, like, the story is coming together. It's not the washed version. It's not the sugar-coated version of how mom and dad met. This is like what really happened."

He continued, "But we do play into the moments that were discussed and that were talked about, just maybe in a slightly varied way that seems like, 'Whoa, wait, we knew that happened, but I didn't know that's why it happened or that's how it happened.'"

Who stars in The Winchesters?

In addition to Ackles and Donnelly, The Winchesters stars Drake Rodger as John Winchester, Bianca Kajilich as Millie Winchester, Demetria McKinney as Ada Monroe, Nida Khurshid as Latika Desai, and Jojo Fleites as Carlos Cervantez. It was also recently announced that Bridget Regan, who may be best known to The CW audiences for her appearance as Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy on Batwoman, had been cast as Rockin' Roxy, a character described as a "honey-voiced pirate radio DJ" who has taken over the airwaves in Lawrence, Kansas to "broadcast a wicked new sound. Not surprisingly, being the world of Supernatural and all, Roxy's listeners aren't all of the human variety."

The Winchesters airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.