The hit series “The Boys” is now airing its fifth and final season. The showrunner, Eric Kripke, recently shared a simple but explosive writing exercise that created Prime Video’s savage superhero satire. He admits the show’s dark vision was a lucky accident, and that real life kept beating him to it.
These days, superhero stories are everywhere. So making a show that successfully “punctures the balloon” of the genre might seem like a smart, planned attack. But Eric Kripke says that wasn’t the case, as the whole thing started as a happy accident.
How a Simple Question Created ‘The Boys’ Satire
Looking back at the early days of adapting Garth Ennis’ comic, Kripke remembered a specific brainstorming trick that unlocked the world of corrupt, fame-hungry Supes. “What’s Aquaman like in the real world? What’s Flash like in the real world? What’s Superman like in the real world?” Kripke asked during an interview with Comic Book Resources.
That simple question got the ball rolling. What began as a thought experiment about realism quickly turned into the show’s main idea. “It really just started with that exercise and then that led to where we are now, which is like, ‘Huh, they’re really like celebrities on the outside and then fascists on the inside, and authoritarians,’” Kripke explained. “Then the things that were happening in the real world, we stumbled onto [them].”
Kripke admits the timing was lucky. When he, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg started working on the pitch around 2016, superheroes were everywhere. “Somebody is going to puncture that balloon, and so it might as well be us right now, because if we don’t do it, someone’s gonna do it,” he said about that first pitch meeting.
Real Life Kept Out Crazing The Show’s Dark Vision
But as the show went on and reached its final season, which started April 8, Kripke noticed that reality stopped copying art and started “out-crazing” it. The show’s scenes of authoritarianism, internment camps, and a flag-draped demagogue named Homelander felt too real.
In case you missed it: Prime Video Axes ‘Gen V’ After 2 Seasons, Teases Big Comeback in ‘The Boys’ Final Chapter
“It’s not a great feeling. It’s a sinking feeling,” Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter. He talked about how hard it was to keep satire ahead of actual headlines. He remembered a strange moment when the show had Homelander demanding to be worshipped like a god. “I thought that was the craziest thing that could ever potentially happen, until Trump released an image of himself as God 48 hours before we aired,” Kripke said at Deadline’s Contenders TV event. “Can I just say, they’re making it really hard to do satire.”
Why ‘The Boys’ Was Always Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Authoritarian
Even with all the darkness, Kripke says the show’s politics, especially its anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian side, were always on purpose. He doesn’t buy the idea that art should stay out of politics.
“The first episode is anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, and it just keeps going from there,” he told CBR. “I don’t think that one of ‘Keep your politics at home as you go to work on your highly political TV show’ is one that never made much sense to me.”
As “The Boys” airs its final episodes, Kripke feels bittersweet. He is proud of what the show did, but he will miss using the writers’ room to make sense of the daily news. “Now I have to swallow it and internalize it like everybody else,” he said. “And that sucks.”
You might also want to read: ‘The Boys’ Season 5 Might Be Hiding Its Biggest Finale Twist In Plain Sight
