The Boys showrunner talks season 3, forthcoming spinoff

Apparently, writing on the third season of The Boys is “enjoyable,” which most people would like but which “worries” showrunner Eric Kripke.

The second season of The Boys premiered on Amazon Prime Video in September, with each episode more exhilarating than the last. The final episode left viewers with plenty of questions, but thankfully, Bleeding Cool reports that production on season 3 will begin in February. But according to showrunner Eric Kripke, writing the new episodes have presented some surprising challenges.

“The thing that has worried me about Season 3 is that it has become really fun and breezy to write again,” Kripke told Consequence of Sound. “That worries me. It’s feeling enjoyable. I should be in intense, deep introspection for this. I know, obviously, that every season of a television show gets a little bit harder because all of your original best instincts to explore have been explored. So, you have to start going to some of the areas that it wouldn’t at first have occurred to you to go to in those stories, and those are always a little trickier to make feel as big and as fascinating as the stuff you hit early on. So, it’s challenging.”

"I like my seasons when they’re over. When I’m making them, I’m like, ‘Man, how do we make this better?’ I was telling someone in my Post department the other day that when I finally approve a cut, like the visual-effects shot, it feels like a defeat to me. It feels like a defeat to me because I have to now admit that either because we’re out of time or money, it’s just not going to get better. So, nothing makes me happier to say than, ‘Oh, I’ve got a whole bunch of notes. Go make it better, dude.’ I’m not the guy who’s like, ‘It’s over, and I’m happy.’ I’m just like, ‘Yeah, man. I wish I had another month with everything.’"

After all of the jaw-dropping moments in the first two seasons, I can’t wait to see what season 3 of The Boys has in store. The show has explored themes like capitalism, xenophobia, and the true meaning of heroism. Now that Frenchie, M.M., Kimiko, Billy and Hughie have gone their separate ways and Hughie is working with Congresswoman Neuman, who is secretly the assassin who’s been exploding people’s heads, what will happen next is anyone’s guess.

And how much longer might we get to enjoy The Boys? Kripke, who also worked on Supernatural, wasn’t spilling any beans. “I’ve learned not to go hard on record with how many years,” he said. “I have literally never been more wrong than any showrunner in history by saying Supernatural should go five seasons and out. So, I’m not saying this hard and fast publicly.”

In other news, fans of the show will soon get another unique look into The Boys universe. Kripke and writer Craig Rosenberg are in the process of developing a show about young adults attending America’s only college for superheroes, which is owned and operated by Vought International. The series will follow the young heroes as they test their limits, pushing the boundaries of sex and competition as they vie for the best contracts.

Kripke did a great interview with The Hollywood Reporter where he spoke about how the college spin-off came to be:

"First, it didn’t come from Amazon telling us, “Hey, you’re a hit, you must do a lot more of the same.” It came from me, [The Boys executive producers] Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Craig Rosenberg just talking. We stumbled on to this corner of the universe that we really loved and we took it to them. So it’s a college show. It’s a Vought-owned college where young kids with powers are trained as to how to be proper superheroes, all leading to an NBA-style draft at the end of the year. It’s sort of like a college sports show meets Fame, because they also have to go to acting classes and marketing classes. It’s going to be a very character-driven, hopefully incredibly realistic, college show."

The Boys is already hilarious, so I can’t wait to see how that humor translates to a show about college kids. As if college wasn’t eventful enough without superpowers as part of the mix.

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