In the second season of The Boys, our heroes drive a boat into a whale. A congresswoman explodes the heads off every other person in a courtroom. One guy with a supernaturally long…um, appendage…uses it to strangle a dude.
The Boys, a superhero series where all the superheroes are amoral monsters, is disgusting. And I say that as a compliment. Every year, it feels like the creative team challenges itself to come up something more grotesque than the year before, and so far they’ve succeeded. Will the upcoming third season continue to the trend? If you listen to the cast and crew, absolutely.
“We definitely have more permission to go nuts,” star Jack Quaid (Hughie Campbell) told Entertainment Weekly. “I feel like every season we reset what the ceiling is, and somehow we push through it. I don’t know how we can keep raising the bar for messed-up things, but Eric keeps finding a way.”
That would be showrunner Eric Kripke, who thinks they were able to up the ante this year only after they proved to Amazon they were worth trusting. “If you were to ask the Amazon executives, they would deny it, but I feel like [‘Herogasm’] was in a strange way a reward for two seasons of a successful show,” Kripke said, referring to a storyline from The Boys comics where superheroes gather for a mass orgy. “There was no way we could have sold that pitch the first season.”
Look, I can’t give away spoilers, but I was lucky enough to get screeners for The Boys season 3. I was eating dinner while watching the premiere and had to stop, because I could not have food in my mouth while watching…that. Hopefully that gives you an idea of what we’re in for.
The Boys season 3 release date: “I don’t know how we did it, but hopefully it’s allowed to air”
The Boys isn’t just about grossing us out. It’s a well-written satire of superhero tropes, capitalism run amok, and much more, tied together by interesting characters played with conviction by a capable ensemble.
…but it’s the blood, guts and raunch that makes the show stand out, some of it too intense for the actors themselves. Take Jensen Ackles, who will be playing a new character named Soldier Boy, a Captain American parody from the ’40s who wakes up in the 2020s having lost none of his deeply ingrained sexism and racism. Apparently, there was something in the scripts so extreme he had to go to Kripke with it. “As a father of three, and a son and a husband and a self-respecting human being, I can’t do this. I didn’t know where my line was, but you found it,” Jensen remembers telling him.
Eventually, Kripke said they were able to find “a compromise where I got what I needed without him destroying his soul.” But still, given that the show is so far over-the-line already, you have to wonder what the non-edited version was like.
The first three episodes of The Boys premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, June 3, with the rest of the episodes coming out one at a time every Friday thereafter. I’ll leave you with Karen Fukuhara’s (Kimiko) thoughts on the new season: “I don’t know how we did it, but hopefully it’s allowed to air.”
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h/t SyFy Wire