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The Boys is a superhero satire on today's politics and Donald Trump by accident, says showrunner, but "we had to run in that direction"
"I don't really have control over this," Eric Kripke says about the direction of Prime Video's superhero satire The Boys
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How did Prime Video’s The Boys become one of the key political satires for the current era? If showrunner Eric Kripke is to be believed, by accident.
“It was really meant to be a celebrity satire, and it was going to be a satire of Hollywood,” Kripke said during an appearance at an Emmys For Your Consideration event; according to the showrunner, producer Seth Rogen’s pitch for the series was essentially, ‘What if Iron Man was Robert Downey Jr.?’ But then, during development on the show, things changed.
“Then Trump got elected [and we] had this observation of ‘Huh, this is at the intersection of authoritarianism and celebrity. Homelander is inherently fascist but has such stage presence,’” Kripke revealed. “And the minute we realized that, we were like, ‘Oh shit.’ I wish I could say I did it intentionally. I did not. But we stumbled onto the perfect metaphor for the moment, and we had to run in that direction as far as we could.”
Talking about the show’s fourth season finale — and the upcoming fifth and final season — Kripke said, “At the time, we were like, ‘Well, let’s make it a cautionary tale. Hopefully everyone will say, Whoo! We dodged that bullet.’ And then we all got hit with the bullet… I won’t spoil season five, but there’s a lot of stuff that we were writing in season five that has sort of already come to pass. People come up to me like, ‘Will you just please write a fucking happy ending?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t really have control over any of this.’”
The first four seasons of The Boys are available on Prime Video.
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