“The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke explains why he’s not putting some kind of final destination date on the series when looking ahead towards an endgame…
“The Boys” is currently nearing the end of season 3 with two more episodes remaining but not to fear — a fourth season of the highly popular show has already been ordered at Amazon Prime.
Because the series will be moving into season 4, questions have started to arise about how long the show might actually last considering “The Boys” is based on comic books of the same name that ran for 72 issues between 2006 and 2012.
Now “The Boys” TV series has already diverged in numerous ways from the original source material, although there are still plenty of nods to the comic books from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson — including the most recent episode centered around “Herogasm.”
When addressing his long term plans for “The Boys,” series showrunner Eric Kripke didn’t want to put a time limit on how long the show might last because he prefers to tell a complete story with each particular season rather than setting everything up for the grand finale. Of course, Kripke says he has ideas about how “The Boys” will end but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s constantly working towards that moment.
“I have what I would consider a cocktail-napkin sketch of what the big-picture story would be,” Kripke told Rolling Stone. “But tangibly, I’m only thinking about the season ahead. I’m totally irritated by the notion of that you might need to go through more than one season of a TV show to start to be entertained by that fucking story. You know, like, I’m old-school that way, coming out of network television. Every episode needs to tell a story. And then each of those stories needs to build up to a season-wide story. And then that season’s one story needs to fucking end. And then the next season, you can start a new one that builds off that.
“The whole idea of “I’m actually making a 20-hour movie?” Fuck you, you’re in the TV business. You’re in the entertainment business, and it’s your job to be entertaining. Every season, it gets harder, for sure. But it gets harder in terms of character arcs, and not repeating ourselves and plunging into sort of deeper levels of psychology. That’s the challenge.”
Judging by how “The Boys” has been unfolding thus far, season 3 might just be the most popular and best group of episodes yet — and that’s saying a lot considering the first two seasons were spectacular while also earning an Emmy nomination for Best Drama Series after season 2.
“The Boys” universe will also be expanding in the near future as well.
After an animated series called “Diabolical” debuted last year, a new spinoff set at a superhero university run by Vought International has been ordered at Amazon with production already underway.
While Kripke couldn’t give too many details on what he has planned with “The Boys” college spinoff, he did promise that there will be some interesting cameos and crossovers from the main series.
“Without spoiling anything, I think there will be several very, very cool cameos,” Kripke teased. “Because it’s a Vought-run college, so crossover with Vought characters is inevitable, really.”
Kripke also said he hopes that “The Boys” spinoff will ultimately find its own footing away from the main series because he wants to make something set in the same universe yet still stands on its own creatively.
“The one lesson I’d certainly taken away from Marvel and what a brilliant job Kevin Feige does is he busts his ass to not repeat himself,” Kripke said. “Especially in the early days when there weren’t quite as many [projects] but each and every hero had a totally different-feeling movie.
“You go from a World War 2 movie to a political thriller to a John Hughes movie. And so, if anything, what we’re trying to do is that. We have an R-rated universe that’s sexually explicit. But what’s a totally different show that could live in that universe? And it’d be an interesting experiment to see if people like it. I love it, but we’ll see if people love it.”
“The Boys” will wrap up with season 3 over the next two Fridays with the season finale dropping on Amazon Prime on Friday, July 8.
While season 4 has already been ordered, there’s no word yet when production on “The Boys” will begin again.
