‘The Boys,’ Amazon’s Savage New Superhero Satire, Is “The Most Topical Show On TV,” Says Showrunner

“Imagine if superheroes were real, in today’s corporate world, with all the corruption and power relationships,” says Eric Kripke, showrunner for The Boys, which debuts on Amazon Prime Video on July 26 following a week of massive buzz at San Diego Comic-Con. “You’d get the worst of politics crossed with the worst of celebrity culture.”

Now imagine a show that takes that premise all the way to every dark, disturbing, absurd and hilarious place, with plot points that seem ripped from today’s headlines.

That’s The Boys,an audacious new series produced by Sony Pictures Television based on the cult favorite comics by writer Garth Ennis (Preacher) and artist Darrick Robertson (Happy, Transmetropolitan). The story follows two innocents, Hughie Campbell (played by Jack Quaid) and Annie January (Erin Moriarty), who get drawn into the sordid world of the supers on opposing sides: April as the newest member of the superteam known as The Seven, and Hughie as part of an underground cell (“The Boys”) dedicated to keeping the capes in check. Hilarity ensues. Also lots of violence, mayhem and general outrageousness.

Considered too profane for original publisher Wildstorm, then an imprint of DC, when it debuted in 2006, The Boys comic series was picked up by Dynamite Entertainment and ran 72 issues. Perhaps it hit too close to home for the publisher of Superman and Wonder Woman, two of The Boys’ many targets. Ennis says he is no fan of superheroes: “I have a fairly low opinion of them; a banal and childish concept that has pretty much defined (and therefore ruined) a great storytelling medium.” That contempt is apparent on pretty much every page. But beyond the satire and sensationalism, The Boysfeatured solid storytelling, great characters, emotional depth, and a structured narrative of story arcs building to a finale that is tailor-made for seasons’ worth of OTT binge-watching.

Kripke, who knows a little something about making good genre-based TV as the creator of the long-running CW hit Supernatural,  has taken all those elements and run with them. “Yes, the show is shocking and has insane moments every episode, but we want it to be a great story first,” he says. “If we have a shocking moment, we want it to support the story. I don’t want stuff to be gratuitous.”

Kripke says he worked hard to get the emotional center of the story right, particularly the pivotal relationship between Hughie and Annie. “The Boysfeatures a thoughtfully built set of characters. It won’t work unless you care about that,” he says. “I think people will be most surprised at when they see how much heart the show has. TV works when you have characters you care about.”

If the characters are the heart of the story, the sendup of superheroes and contemporary society is the bone and muscle. That’s where Kripke and his team of writers, directors and actors really lean in.

“We think we’re making one of the most topical shows on TV,” he says. “It’s about politics, celebrity, manipulation through media … all the things the world is now neck-deep in. One of the things that makes the show a joy to work on, but also scary, is that Garth predicted – more than ten years ago! – this combination of celebrity and real power, and how that would f**k over the common man.”

 “I wrote the book in the Bush era, which is why it’s full of corporate corruption of government, abuse of power, people being abandoned and cast out into the storm, and so on,” says Ennis. “The central theme of the book is that it’s a bad world run by bad men, and it takes another bad man- Billy Butcher [the protagonist, played by Karl Urban in the show] – to oppose them. Flash forward fifteen years and we seem to have an even worse world, but with fiction riddled with fantasy figures and myths of empowerment.”

One of the elements that makes Ennis’s comics so satisfying is that, for all the grotesque and unpleasant characters he offers up in his stories, eventually, all the butts that need kicking get kicked, hard. The first few episodes of The Boys make pretty clear who those are, and if the series is executed right, it will end up offering some much-needed catharsis, at least within the fictional world.

Kripke is also emphatic that viewers won’t have to wait forever for stories to resolve. “I hate it when people say, ‘I’m not making TV, I’m making an 8-hour movie… hang in there for the first 4 hours, because 5 gets great.’ F**k that! I’m a believer in good, clean TV structure. An episode has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. there’s a season 1 story, that will pay out and climax, but will open the door for a Season 2 story that will play out. And on and on.”

About how many seasons might it take to tell the full story of The Boys? “Five is a good round number,” says Kripke. “We’ll see how it goes.”

The first eight-episode arc drops on Amazon Prime Video July 26.

Source: Forbes.com

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