Plenty of showrunners in Hollywood can claim that they’ve been in this business for a long time, but it’s hard to beat Eric Kripke’s track record of longevity on a single show. In 2005 Kripke created Supernatural, which recently wrapped its 15th season as the longest-running American sci-fi/fantasy television series.
It’s been more than a decade since Kripke stepped down as Supernatural’s showrunner, and now he’s making history again with The Boys, one of Amazon Prime Video’s biggest success stories. The raunchy, hyper-violent adaptation of Darick Robertson and Garth Ennis’s raunchy, hyper-violent comic book about superheroic powers run amok proved a surprise hit for the streamer in its first season. Its second season, which debuted September last year, switched from a binge model to week-to-week and became a bonafide, word-of-mouth juggernaut extending its reach far beyond comic book fans and netting Kripke his first Emmy nomination after nearly two decades of work.
If you’ve watched the show’s astonishingly topical second season, it’s not at all hard to see why the Television Academy decided to honor The Boys with five nominations, including a juicy spot in the best drama category. From the outside, the gleefully dark world of The Boys, which Robertson and Ennis created in response to the authoritarian abuses of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the so-called war on terror, might seem too much of a guilty pleasure to be considered Emmy worthy. But beneath the candy-coating of violence and dark humor lies an urgent commentary on the intersection of capitalism and unchecked, authoritarian power. The fact that the second season debuted smack dab between last year’s summer of racial reckoning and the Trump/Biden election only underlined the clever and often chilling way The Boys found to comment on the way we live now.
The show features a cast of vain, greedy, and depraved superheroes who, even more than the characters in the original comics, bear a striking physical resemblance to the heroes who have raked in billions at the box office for Marvel and DC. The show’s central bad guy, Antony Starr’s Homelander, is a gleefully psychotic hybrid of Superman and Captain America. But the real villain of the piece might just be the corporation that created him in the first place. In the second season, Homelander gets a partner worthy of his depraved abuses of power in Aya Cash’s Stormfront—a seductive, sardonic white supremacist who just happens to be a whiz at social media.
Kripke likes to boil down the plot as: “Marvel’s real, they have real superheroes, and they’ve taken over the world. My mom, who doesn’t watch superhero movies, completely understands that superheroes are the top of every box office list, and they’re all over television and have completely hijacked pop culture. Our show is the real world in every single way, with the one difference that the superheroes that everyone is worshiping happened to be real.”
The second season of The Boys began with sequences that eerily presaged the January 6th attack on the capitol, an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-esque Congresswoman, and a darkly cynical exploration on how corporate America will turn a blind-eye to white supremacy if it benefits the bottom line. The season overall felt like genre television doing what it does best in easing an audience in with flashy, fun premises that ultimately hold up an unflinching mirror that expose ugly truths about our own world.
Kripke spoke to V.F. about the TV Academy’s increasing embrace of genre television and how his successes in the first two seasons have emboldened him to go even bigger for Season 3. Kripke also explained how next season’s reunion with his Supernatural star Jensen Ackles—who will take on the Captain America-inspired role of Soldier Boy—will help him dive into the role toxic masculinity played in creating some of the darker truths we’re living with today. You can hear this conversation with Kripke in full on the Little Gold Men podcast as well.
Vanity Fair: I was reading your instant reaction to the Emmy nominations, where you were calling yourself out for being cliché. And I was wondering if, with a little bit more time, if you felt like you had a non-cliché response?
Eric Kripke: It took about a full 24 hours for it to actually sink in. I was in my car, and the thought finally occurred to me: holy shit, I need a tuxedo.
If you look at the Emmys last year, we could say maybe that Watchmen loosened the lid a little on this idea of comic book television as Emmy worthy. But you’ve been doing genre television for so long, what does it mean to you for the Television Academy to be like, yes, we’re ready to talk about this?
I mean, look, nobody gets into genre for the awards. But the fact that we’re being recognized by our peers for the work we’re doing, is very nice. People have asked me: Is this a golden age of genre? And my response is: It’s always been this good. Always. From Rod Serling, through Gene Roddenberry, through Buffy The Vampire Slayer, X-Files, etc. Good genre comments on our world and holds a mirror up to it. Good genre is way more subversive, rebellious, and revolutionary than, I think, what mainstream entertainment can do. We rarely get recognized for it. Watchmen for sure. Also, it’s hard to forget Game of Thrones. So I mean, I think it’s been slow but steady. But it’s nice.
To your point, something that both Watchmen and The Boys—especially season two—do so well is that mirroring that you were talking about. There’s something to be said for holding up a mirror to some of the hardest truths of our current society through the lens of genre. It gives audiences some comfortable distance. But then what that means is that you’re making some of the most urgent political television that’s out there.
Thank you for saying that because we work really hard at it. The madness of the show is the spoonful of sugar. 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.
Also you should be extremely skeptical and suspicious of anyone who stands in front of you and says: I am your hero and I’m here to save you. That person is selling you something. So being able to discuss all of that, I think, is really important. The Boys comic has been around for well over a decade. But this world happens to explain the exact second we’re living in. Once we realized that, we said, well, let’s run with that as far as we can.
Ennis and Robertson made this comic in reaction to the Bush era and it’s also an Obama-era comic. But the show feels so Trump era to those of us watching at home. Also how can you not, when Season 2 premieres in September 2020, right after a summer of racial reckoning, feel like you really picked the right time to do the Stormfront season?
I think Garth Ennis is the best comic book writer out there, period. He was just incredibly prescient in terms of predicting this intersection of politics and celebrity. [With the show], we’re hitting certain things harder to reflect what’s happening in our world. He 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 want to talk to you about the release strategy for Season 2. You went from a binge model in Season 1, to a week-to-week in Season 2. Was that something you were advocating for? Were you pleased with the results?
I know some of the fans were unhappy, but it was completely producer driven. Season 1 got an amazing response. But, honestly, 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. 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.
Something that folks are looking forward to in Season 3 is that you tweeted out in January about “Herogasm” [an over-the-top raunchy premise from the comics] as an episode that you’re doing. I’m just wondering, you felt that emboldened in January. How much more emboldened do you feel after you’re nominated for best drama? What are you going to do to top “Herogasm?”
There will be no topping up “Herogasm.” 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.
It’s hard to call this last season one thing, but maybe we could call it “the Stormfront season.” Would you have a concise way to describe Season 3?
Season 3 delves a lot more into the history of how we got here through this character of Soldier Boy. We were able to dig into both the history of the country and also really look at toxic masculinity, and masculine roles, and what a shit-show that’s overall caused. This whole fucking, independent Marlboro man thing.
I know you’ve talked a bit already about working with [Supernatural star] Jensen Ackles again and what it’s like to put Jensen in this part. Did you decide you wanted to do Soldier Boy and then were like: aha, Jensen! Or Jensen’s suddenly free, and you’re like, now it’s time to do the Soldier Boy season?
We had written Soldier Boy long before I cast Jensen. The majority of the guys we were looking at for that part were actually quite older than Jensen. Because it’s a World War II hero. But it’s so funny how these things sometimes happen. Jensen called me and I’m not on the show anymore but we keep in touch and text every so often. But he happened to call me and we were just chatting and I’m like well I’m prepping Season 3 of the show, and I have this character Soldier Boy, and it was a real pain in the to cast, and I haven’t really found anyone. Hey, wait a minute, do you want to do it? I sent him the script, and he’s like, oh my God, I totally want to do this. Less than a week later, he was cast. He just happened to call that day, is one of the big reasons he got that part.
You’ve talked a little bit about a focus on your fictional Fox News analogue, the corporate-owned VNN, in Season 3. What are you looking to say about the media and its role in all of this?
I think misinformation is so dangerous and cynical. It’s so obvious that they’re willing to actively harm people. I mean, look at all this shit about the vaccine cynicism. These kind of networks are outrage machines that specifically slant information in an inaccurate way. Then there’s bigger ratings, and then they make more money. It’s so wildly irresponsible and destructive to civil discourse and it’s straight up propaganda. That’s another big issue of something that we thought richly demanded ridicule.
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