Will fans of Eric Kripke’s Supernatural also like The Boys?
Showrunner Eric Kripke spoke on whether Supernatural fans would also enjoy watching his new Amazon Original series The Boys, and his answer might surprise you.
On the surface, the first season of Supernatural was a show about two brothers who travel to a new town in each week to hunt a monster and search for their father. But as any Supernatural fan knows, the show’s story became much more complex with underlying themes and messages about family, loyalty, and the fight for good to defeat evil. Kripke’s new dark fantasy Amazon Original, The Boys is a violent, graphic, and expletive-filled show who’s villain is a multi-billion dollar mega-corporation who has total control of superhero celebrities and influencers.
At the surface layer, it’s about a pair of ordinary humans who create “The Boys” in a quest to take down the superhuman “Supes” and the corruption they bring to society. Last week at SDCC, Kripke spoke on the connections between Supernatural and The Boys, and offered some insight to the underlying themes audiences can expect to find in the new Amazon Original.
“The shows have very similar themes. I think this show is about family. I think this show is about The Boys, who are the good guys in the show. The Boys are the heroes because they stay together, and they show each other loyalty, and they’ve got each other’s back,” Kripke said. “They’re willing to admit vulnerability and weakness, and they’re scared and outmatched. They’re taking on these powerful forces, not dissimilar from the way Sam and Dean would take on monsters and demons.”
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Something Kripke loves about the presentation of strength and power in The Boys is how the characters who are the strongest physically can be the weakest emotionally, a concept that also recurs in Supernatural. “What I love is the heroes of the show are the people that can express vulnerability and weakness and be imperfect,” Kripke said.
“The villains of the show are these sort of slick people who stand in front of the world and refuse to admit any sort of weakness and somehow think that demonstrating or projecting strength at all times is somehow good, when what it is is dictatorial and autocratic and total bullshit. So, the people who appear to be strong on the show are actually weak, and the people who are weak in the show are actually quite strong, because we all need each other as people.”
At the surface, Kripke said The Boys is: “Superheroes are real, if they were real they’d be dicks. Here’s the team that fights them.” And while he assured us you can watch the show at that basic level and still “have a blast,” there is absolutely more going on. “We spend a lot of time building the iceberg under the water with the emotion and with the satire and with the thematics to make sure there’s a real deep level and that people want to explore it.”
So will you enjoy The Boys if you’re a fan of Supernatural? If you don’t mind the violence, adult content, and political satire being turned up quite a few notches, we absolutely think you should give The Boys a try.
Next. How The Boys adapted the comic's "shocking" Supes for TV. dark
The Boys is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Check back with Hidden Remote for more news about The Boys and SDCC.