Amazon’s smash hit superhero series The Boys recently wrapped up its second season, which happened five weeks too late for some fans who review bombed one of their favorite series because they didn’t get all eight episodes at once. Showrunner Eric Kripke addressed the criticism head on, though, and he’s completely right in saying that the weekly release model gave the various plot threads more time to breathe.
These days, a huge number of high-profile TV shows are unveiled in their entirety and binge-watched by the viewers, but then they quickly fade from memory in a matter of weeks once the initial buzz has died down, while The Boys dominated the headlines every week as the adventures of Billy Butcher and the gang escalated to insane new heights each Friday.
The subversive comic book adaptation has even threatened Netflix’s position as the undisputed home of bingeable TV, with season 2 the only one of the world’s most-streamed original shows that doesn’t hail from the market leaders, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that people couldn’t devour the entire run in one sitting.
After a show-stopping finale, The Boys has moved several major pieces around the board, and in a recent interview, Kripke admitted that he can’t believe where season 3 will be heading, even though he’s the person directly responsible for it.
“Season 3 is going to be so f**king crazy. Like even in the first episode, the first ten minutes of that episode there is a sequence that I will not give away that like literally every time we even talk about it I like cover my mouth, it’s so f**king bananas. But we’re also still going to go deeper into characters and keep exploring and really put characters forward, but f**k man, there’s crazy s**t coming.”
Quite how The Boys will manage to keep topping the insanity that’s become the show’s hallmark is anyone’s guess, but with viewing numbers reportedly close to doubling throughout season 2 compared to the first run, the jet black deconstruction of the superhero genre could be here for a while yet, even if Kripke thinks five years is the perfect amount of time after which to end it.