For close to seven years, The Boys has consistently been one of the best-reviewed and most-praised TV shows worldwide. The violent satire on consumerism, power, and superhero culture took the world by storm with season 1 in 2019 and has not let go of the audience, even now that it is in the home stretch with its fifth and final season.
Eric Kripke on finally doing a series finale
Ahead of the grand finale, the show’s creator, Eric Kripke, sat down with Hindustan Times to talk about the bittersweet feeling of the show ending and the ‘terror’ around the reception of the audience.
It is not easy to say goodbye to a show that one has built for the better part of a decade. Eric says, “I am proud of the show, and proud we were able to end it on our terms and go out on top. It’s actually the first time I have been able to finish a show. It is the first series finale I ever worked on. That was a pleasure.”
He likens the cast and crew going to shoot other projects to children leaving home after growing up. “It’s sad because the cast and the crew in Toronto are already starting to scatter in the wind. Ant (Antony Starr) is shooting something, and Karen (Fukuhara) is going to shoot something. It feels like watching everybody fly away,” he says. “Like leaving the nest,” as the show’s star Erin Moriarty puts it.
‘I approached the finale with terror’
Eric has most famously created Supernatural, a show he left after five seasons, and hence did not work on its finale. Something similar happened with other shows of his, like Revolution and Timeless. But this time, he is finally working on a series finale, and it came with mixed feelings, he says. “I approached the finale with a proper amount of terror,” says Eric. “Shows tend to be retroactively judged based on how the finale is, which is completely unfair. But nevertheless, it’s a fact of life. I was so excited that I got to make a finale, and then when I got to it, I thought, ‘Oh dear God, why did I ask for this?’”
In recent years, acclaimed shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things have faced this phenomenon of being seen as lesser because of underwhelming finales after great runs over multiple seasons.
But jokes aside, Eric knows his responsibility of doing right by the show. “I really have to land this plane well for people to continue thinking of The Boys as a truly great show,” he says.
About The Boys’ final season
The Boys begins premiering on Amazon Prime Video with the first episode of the fifth season on April 8, with weekly releases after that till the finale on May 20. The show stars Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Jessie T. Usher, Laz Alonso, Chace Crawford, Tomer Capone, Karen Fukuhara, Nathan Mitchell, Colby Minifie, Cameron Crovetti, Susan Heyward, Valorie Curry, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Jensen Ackles.
