Supernatural, season 1

Twenty-two years ago Mary Winchester died pinned to a nursery ceiling, burning, and John Winchester turned his sons into soldiers in a war most people never see. Dean stayed in the life; Sam got out, to Stanford and a girlfriend and a law-school interview - until Dean turns up needing help finding their missing father, and Sam comes home to find Jessica on the ceiling, burning, and the exit closed behind him.

The season is the road: two brothers in a black Impala working their father's journal across the country - a woman in white, a wendigo, a phantom traveller, a scarecrow god in an orchard. The monster-of-the-week engine is set here, and so is the divide the show will run on for years: Sam wants the thing that killed the women dead and a life after; Dean cannot imagine an after.

Underneath runs the demon with yellow eyes. Sam's headaches become visions; other young people with gifts turn up dead or worse; and John, when they find him, is hunting the same thing with a gun that can kill anything - a Colt with a handful of bullets.

It ends with the family together for once, the demon possessing John from the inside, Sam unable to pull the trigger on his father's body - and a truck hitting the Impala broadside, all three of them inside.