10 Small Details You Only Notice Rewatching Supernatural
5. Hollywood Babylon
'Hollywood Babylon', Season 2, Episode 18, is the first episode in the series that focused on self-referential meta humor. In this episode Sam and Dean go undercover in Hollywood on the set of a horror film. The sheer volume of references make it hard to catch them all.
Some are more obvious:
When a tour guide points out the set of Gilmore Girls that they are passing, they say, "And if we're lucky we might even catch one of the show's stars." This is a reference to Jared Padalecki's role on Gilmore Girls.
Later, Dean talks to Tara (his favorite actor in the horror film), and mentions her role in Boogeyman. She says that she thinks the script of that film was terrible. Tara is a fictional character, but Boogeyman was a real film, one Eric Kripke helped develop and write.
Other references are more subtle and personal to the show:
Supernatural sometimes had a difficult time with the CW network. They didn't always understand the show's vision. CW's actual critiques were incorporated into the set of fictional horror film with things like wondering if the film could be "brighter." Saying, "Who says horror has to be dark?"
Or the critique that the original horror script didn't have any love interests and was mostly exposition. Dean responds by saying that he thinks the original horror script was actually pretty good -a winking response to critics of Supernatural.