‘The Boys’ Showrunner On The Plague Of ‘10 Hour Movies’ Explains A Lot About TV Now

The Boys, by all accounts, is a great show. Beloved by both critics and fans, it just wrapped up its third (and best) season and is looking ahead not just to a greenlit season 4, but also a spin-off, Gen V, as Amazon capitalizes on its biggest overall hit in the streaming age.

Why is The Boys a hit? Great casting, writing, direction, etc, of course, but there may be one reason that’s overlooked, that it’s being treated like an actual TV show. That may sound obvious, but it really is not in the current streaming era. Showrunner Eric Kripke (always a great interview) told Vulture about what drives him crazy about the current landscape of “prestige” faux-movie TV, and why he’s trying to do The Boys differently:

“The downside of streaming is that a lot of filmmakers who work in streaming didn’t necessarily come out of that network grind. They’re more comfortable with the idea that they could give you 10 hours where nothing happens until the eighth hour. That drives me f—ing nuts, personally.”

“As a network guy who had to get you people interested for 22 f—ing hours a year, I didn’t get the benefit of, ‘Oh, just hang in there and don’t worry. The critics will tell you that by Episode 8, shit really hits the fan.’ Or anyone who says, ‘Well, what I’m really making is a 10-hour movie.’ F—k you! No you’re not! Make a TV show. You’re in the entertainment business.”

Kripke comes from Supernatural, the aforementioned 22 episode series that ran for 15 seasons and 327 episodes total. While The Boys is content doing eight episodes a season, the point Kripke is making that he’s still employing some of those same lessons. You can’t just have seven hours of build-up for one blockbuster finale. You need to keep people engaged as you go, which is why everyone might be talking about a given Boys episode each week where something new and insane happens, even if the season is still following an overall storyline, and it’s not “case of the week” procedural. It’s what lets random episodes like Herogasm be standouts by themselves.

So who is doing it wrong? While Kripke isn’t naming names, there are a few obvious culprits. I think a lot of shows on Netflix suffer from this because all the showrunners know that they are working with the binge model where no one is waiting week to week. So they feel more comfortable putting in filler/rising action episodes because they’re all being watched at once.

I’d also argue that even if this isn’t what Kripke is referring to directly, this is essentially the entire Marvel model of TV shows, where pretty much all its MCU shows on Disney Plus feel like four hours movies that have been chopped up into six episodes with no real regard for overall structure, despite airing week to week. “That could have been a movie” is something you could say about probably half the shows we’ve seen there, easily, and it’s unclear when or if that will change.

In any case, whatever Kripke is doing, he should keep doing it. And perhaps other people should start paying closer attention to his philosophies.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.