The second season of The Boys landed on Amazon Prime Video last year, and from the start, it hit a chord. The story about vain, greedy superheroes worshipped by the public even as they did unconscionable things behind closed doors seemed especially relevant in a time when politics was becoming more and more fractured, people were losing trust in their leaders and events like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville featured actual Nazis proudly marching on American soil.
It was a scary time, and rife ground for satire. The Boys showrunner Erik Kripke just happened to find himself with the perfect vehicle to explore it. “There’s an expression we say in the writers room a lot: ‘Bad for the world, good for the show.’ I found myself suddenly in this position where I was working on something that happened to speak to the exact second we were living in,” Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter. “I wish I could say that was some brilliant, long-planned strategy, but it’s not…The superhero metaphor just worked for every single element of our society for the moments we’re living in right now.
"It was the daily headlines that inspired it. We drew from them pretty extensively. Those were the early days of the Trump administration. A really toxic xenophobia was just starting to spread. And then there was Charlottesville. White supremacy and Nazis, they scare the living fuck out of me. And it’s just so insane that it’s a controversial opinion that, like, Nazis are bad. It’s just fucking insane to me! I really walked into season two with the direction of “We’re going to tell a story about a modern-day white supremacist.” The books have a Stormfront, but it’s a man and he’s very German. It’s all pretty much what you see is what you get. But modern-day white supremacy is so insidious with social media and the way it draws people in. It’s not weird dudes with strange mustaches — it’s cute girls on YouTube talking about how they’re independent thinkers. I think that’s so scary and really needed to be talked about. And again, yes, it’s a superhero show — but we have a show where we can actually talk about that stuff. I was really passionate about exploring that."
Hence Stormfront (Aya Cash), the unassuming literal Nazi who hooked up with Homelander (Anthony Starr) in season 2. Kripke and company used her character to explore very real, very scary topics, all while serving up plenty of eye-popping superhero action to keep fans hooked minute to minute. “The madness of the show is the spoonful of sugar,” Kripke explained to Vanity Fair. “It’s also the thing that can be noisy and gets asses in the seats. The crazy, gonzo moments are just what’s on the front of the cereal box. What we’re really interested in is late-stage capitalism and white supremacy cloaked in social media and systemic racism. Also character and really understanding the humanity of people and how the real heroes are the last to stand in front of everyone and say: I’m going to save you. Real heroes just quietly get along, without any praise of getting the work done.”
"[The Boys comic book author Garth Ennis] always had authoritarians pose as celebrities, that was the gimmick. We happen to live in a world where one of them was our president. The white supremacy thing, I mean, that character Stormfront, was in his books. It was about how corporations and capitalism will allow white supremacy into its ranks as long as it’s profitable. And all we did was say, well, what does white supremacy look like these days, versus 10 years ago? And it doesn’t take long to land at social media. It’s a very ugly, old idea, packaged in this, new bouncy way. None of it’s new. Things like systemic racism and white supremacy have been around since the country’s founding."
I do love how bold Kripke is about all of this. It may be hard to recreate the immediacy of season 2 in season 3 — the zeitgeist moves on — but clearly he’s willing to take risks.
What’s in store for The Boys season 3?
Speaking of season 3, Kripke has his satirical targets already lined up. “I can say that we spent the first two seasons exploring a lot of things that are going on in the United States, and in the third season we got interested in the history of the Vought universe and its fractured reflection of the United States,” he told THR. “It’s like how people say that there are ‘good old days’ and that somehow there’s some sort of past that we need to be great again and return to; the issues we talk about on the show — racism, white supremacy, violence and sexual predation — have always been here. Make America great again for who exactly?
"We have this character Soldier Boy, played by Jensen Ackles, who has been around since World War II, and through him we’re able to delve into issues as disparate as toxic masculinity and racism and some of the wars we’ve been through. We’ve been able to explore not just the here and now but the past — and that’s exciting."
Jensen Ackles, incidentally, worked with Kripke for years back when he was the showrunner on Supernatural, where Ackles played lead character Dean Winchester.
Naturally, Kripke wouldn’t give away many specifics, although he did allude to the upcoming “Herogasm” episode, which will revolve around a debaucherous getaway where superheroes gather to do all manner of extraordinary things with each other. “There will be no topping up ‘Herogasm,'” Kripke told Vanity Fair. “Now that I’ve seen the dailies of this thing, I’m like, what have we done? It’s just so crazy. They’ve always let us do what we wanted to do but I think because of that it comes with a responsibility to moderate and modulate ourselves. You never want to fall on the side of just being gratuitous and just gross. I don’t want this show to be irresponsible. I want it to be shocking and outrageous, but of a moral universe.”
The Boys wouldn’t have gotten an Emmy nomination if all the episodes were available at once
The Boys made headlines again when it was nominated for Best Drama at the Emmys, rare for a genre show, especially one as gleefully violent and profane as The Boys. Kripke chocks the nomination up in part to the fact that the second season was released on a weekly basis one episode at a time, rather than dropped all at once a la a Netflix series.
“I think it’s dissatisfying to put that much effort and care into every detail and then have this two-week orgy of attention and love for the show,” he explained. “And then it’s just completely disposable. We just wanted to be a part of the conversation longer. We wanted to give the audience an opportunity to obsess over whatever happened in that particular episode’s madness. A lot of fans were really upset, and I get it. But I have to say, as the experiment, it was an incredibly successful one. We broke through in a way that other shows that are very good, but have a binge strategy, are not breaking through. We got into the conversation long enough that people started telling their friends and more articles were written. I have no doubt in my mind that we would not be nominated for best drama had we been in the binge model, rather than weekly.”
I agree with all of that, for the record. Netflix’s model has its place, but I like that some shows still come out one installment at a time.
The Boys spinoff is like Marvel, “but with a ton more dick jokes”
There’s no set release date for The Boys season 3 as of yet, but a premiere date in early 2022 seems likely. And Kripke is doing everything he can to ensure that it’s a season to remember, even as production becomes more difficult in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “robably to the irritation of some of my benefactors, my attitude from the beginning has been no creative compromises,” he said. “The audience will not grade us on a curve. They will not say it’s OK that it’s not quite as good as the second season because, gosh, it sure was hard to make. We have to make sure the audience never knows the difference. But behind the scenes, everything’s different. The amount of work we can get done in a day, the amount of crowds we can put in the background, how we travel from place to place — every single thing. It’s all slower and harder and takes longer. It’s been really, really challenging. The crew, to their credit, have been champs — they’ll wear their masks for 14 hours a day, every day.”
And after that, Kripke is working on a spinoff of The Boys set in a superhero college! “We’re writing furiously” he told THR. “I think it’s coming along really great. It’s exciting in that sort of perverted Marvel way — in the way that different Marvel projects are very different: One’s a thriller, one’s a comedy. This feels like that, too, but with a ton more dick jokes.”
As Kripke told Vanity Fair, superheroes may have “completely hijacked pop culture,” but at least he’s making the most of it.
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