Based on the comic book series The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, creator Eric Kripke built a biting satirical TV series about a group of anti-superheroes. Now in its penultimate season, we caught up with Eric and co-executive producer/ writer David Reed to discuss the heartbeat of the show and what makes it so popular.
“The spine of The Boys has remained remarkably consistent over the seasons. Homelander (Antony Starr) is accruing more power and going crazier. Billy Butcher (Karl Butcher), the Holmes to his Moriarty, is wrestling with his own soul into darker deaths and becoming the monster [Homelander] he’s fighting in order to destroy.”
Building the world around the characters has been the key to keeping the show fresh and exciting – Eric Kripke
Kripke compares The Boys to The Simpsons because every detail in the show is meticulously planned. “I’m really proud of our ability to add to that so that you really feel like you’re visiting a very lived in, ridiculously stupid dystopia.”
Honoring The Satire Of The Comics
Maintaining fidelity to the source material is as essential as adding a modernized, personal slant to the show. The comic book series was published between 2008 and 2014 in response to the post 9/11 Bush era political landscape.
Eric Kripke
“We live in a different world now, I’d argue, an even worse one. While we’re taking those same shots, we have different targets. We’re still trying to do it in the brash, take no prisoners, and give no shits in a way that Garth inspired us to do,” notes Eric.
“In terms of reflecting the comic, we’re working hard to get the tone and the characters right in the show.”
“It’s hard to find a story in the comic, which is episodic and would sustain itself over eight episodes. So, we tend to invent our own stories for the season, like that story-wide, season-wide mythology. And then we try to hang on it as many elements and fun moments from the comic that we all love,” elaborates Kripke.
The comic always was a punk rock satire of the politics of that world – Eric Kripke
Although it may seem that The Boys has few guardrails in terms of pushing the extremities of satire, Kripke has ironically vetoed certain storylines for being “too crazy” in the writers’ room.
“This show goes further than a lot of shows, but I think that’s actually just part of truth-telling because I think the world is way crazier than most TV shows would acknowledge,” adds Reed.
David Reed
“In terms of satire, what we’re aiming at is trying to make people see a reflection of the real world, but also sometimes you just need a spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down. I think that’s where the humor in the show comes from. I think that helps the show because it keeps it feeling grounded and real, even when it also goes to insane places.”
Developing The Characters
The Boys might appear to be a show about pushing situations to their extremities, but Reed and Kripke contend that they spend most time in the writers’ room developing the emotional depth of the characters.
We succeed or fail by how much we can make people love our characters – Eric Kripke
“My feeling, especially on the villains of the piece, which are The Seven, is that you don’t have to condone them. You don’t have to agree with them. You don’t have to sympathize with them. But you do have to understand them,” adds Kripke. “Otherwise you’re just writing either a mustache-twirling villain or someone who’s crazy.”
“I need to understand why are they doing what they’re doing. Why do they think that’s the right move? Everyone’s the hero of their own story. Everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing,” he continues. The writers dug deep into each character bearing in mind what superpower they possess.
“In the beginning, it was a lot easier because we asked, ‘What’s the world’s most realistic version of The Flash?’ Then we landed on a professional athlete who’s super stressed and taking steroids,” continues Kripke. This creates variations in the core characters and story possibilities. Each character has a distinctive point of view that is vastly different from that of many people.
As the seasons of The Boys progressed, the stories became more about their motivations than their superpowers. “Who are they? Where are they coming from? What role in The Seven is missing that we need? Where do we find holes or deficiencies in that group? And sometimes we need a woman to stand up to Homelander.”
Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) Photo courtesy of Amazon Prime
Kripke mentions that many people in The Seven are “idiots,” so they had to bring in a genius. Reed adds that Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) is the genius who’s much smarter than both The Seven and The Boys.
The writers of the show spend considerable time telling personal stories about their feelings and reactions to the world today in the writers’ room. “Those discussions end up very often becoming the stories that the characters are telling and the attitudes that they’re taking,” notes Reed.
For instance, they might consider how Huey Campbell (Jack Quaid) feels the concept of hope and deals amid all the bad things that happen in his life.
Kripke finally identified theme after multiple seasons of the show. “For me, they’re all imperfect, broken families of people just reaching out to each other in the darkness. There’s so much strength in someone accepting and loving you, and taking you by the arm and say, ‘It’s going to be all right. I’m here with you.'”
For Reed, he sees the main theme of Season 4 as, “You have to face your past in order to move forward. Season Four is a little bit of an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ season, where we’re ending The Boys on a pretty major downbeat. But also, we’re giving them all the tools that they need to hopefully get back onto an upswing as the story moves forward.”
Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) Photo courtesy of Amazon Prime
There are also various stories with characters like Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Huey who are “reckoning with decisions that they’ve made or things that have happened that they haven’t been able to get over. And they can’t really go into the final fight until they’ve fought that internal battle.”
Eric refers to the finale which David co-wrote with Jess Chou to capture the heart of the season. There’s Huey’s speech to the rest of The Boys “where he says mercy, forgiveness and letting go are the things that are brave and require strength. Those are the things that are hard. And that’s what people should aspire to. They all have to let go of their pasts. They all have to quit looking for vengeance. Violence and nihilism is the coward’s way out.”
[More: Rebecca Sonnenshine On ‘The Boys’]
Writing Season 4
David Reed wrote two episodes of the third and fourth seasons, giving him a unique perspective since he wasn’t involved in The Boys from its inception. Working on Season 3 gave him a solid foundation of where Season 4 was going to go. It was a matter of building the story engine that drives the series.
In going into Season 4, they knew there was an upcoming Federal election that year, the power dynamics between The Boys and The Seven were changing in certain ways, and Butcher was ill. Much of this was figured out a year and a half before they started the writers’ room.
Eric Kripke would state the over-arching goal for Season 4 when the writers’ room started as the North Star. A major building block for Season 4 was discussing how we react to the world today and “get out of our heads” for a while. “It can be frustrating to live in the world and not have an outlet to be able to deal with your frustrations, but also talk about the things that you love about it,” reinforces Reed.
“This is the direction that maybe you wouldn’t have seen coming based on the end of the previous season. Then we spend a month or two blue-skying and asking, ‘What is the crazy stuff that we want to see and what are the things that are happening in the real world today that we want to talk about?'” shares Reed.
Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) (Ryan) and Homelander Antony Starr) Photo courtesy of Amazon Prime
“Because every season in between when we finish production and when we start writing the next season, the world gets crazier in new ways and there are new things for us to respond to,” continues Reed. These discussions would become the plan to outline eight episodes for the season.
Season 5 – Finding The Natural Ending
The Boys will enjoy a fifth and final season. “It’s such a gift to be able to end the show on our terms,” ponders Kripke. “The television graveyard is littered with the corpses of bad finales. We feel a real obligation and responsibility to stick the landing when the show ends.”
The aim is to “give every character their moment, their climax, and resolution in a way that’s satisfying.”
The challenge of The Boys is propelling the show is finding places and situations where these characters haven’t been through already so it doesn’t feel repetitive.
“How do you uncover deeper layers of each one of them while also giving the audience forward momentum and the insane twists and turns, visuals and the humor that the show is known for?” continues Eric.
“But particularly in Season Four, I think we had of stop and say, ‘We also know where we want to end up. How can we start putting the pieces in place so that Season Five can end with a satisfying conclusion?” he notes.
This allowed the writers to consider where a storyline belongs in the overall trajectory of the series. “Is this an idea that belongs in this place in a story or does it belong closer to the end? Is there anything that we’ve always wanted to do and we might not have a place for later?””
“There’s a moment in the finale that was added by Eric, that I found to be a good counterpoint to the hopefulness of Huey’s message. It’s the moment Butcher’s in his hospital bed, and he’s lying on his back, weighing the responsibility he has to the world, and what that means for him and Ryan. Can Ryan be a good person, or is he going to end up just as bad as his father? And there is a match cut to Homelander in the exact same position in the frame,” recalls David.
