Over five seasons, the Amazon superhero satire “The Boys,” which wraps up in a few weeks, has established itself as TV’s pre-eminent purveyor of deviant, over-the-top violence.
The goal is never to shock viewers for shock’s sake, Eric Kripke, the showrunner, said in a video interview. “I want them to feel like maybe it was gross, maybe I had to avert my eyes, but you can feel like there was a depth to it.”
But Kripke and his writers also want to entertain and amuse themselves, which has led them to strive for bigger, more inventive, more grotesque set pieces each season.
Based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the show follows a group of vigilantes known as the Boys, who try to curb the influence of superheroes, known as “supes.” Led by the maniacal Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), the Boys’ primary target is the ostensibly patriotic Homelander (Antony Starr), an increasingly unhinged, fascistic presence.
“The Boys” fuses dark comedy with often cartoonishly graphic violence, and the bloody absurdity of its big moments illustrates that combination. Here’s how the show upped the ante from season to season.
An inciting instant death (Season 1, Episode 1)
In the first episode, the then-innocent protagonist Hughie (Jack Quaid) is talking with his girlfriend, Robin (Jess Salgueiro), on the street when she is suddenly obliterated by the superfast hero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher). He plows through Robin, exploding her in a shower of blood, bone and guts. Kripke said it was the most faithfully rendered scene from the comics.
“The more emotional and awful it is, the stronger your show is,” he said. “Because this is what really launches Hughie and the audience into this mission.”
It was the director Dan Trachtenberg who suggested that they film Hughie’s reaction — and Robin’s viscera — in slow motion. Kripke was initially skeptical because he was focused on A-Train’s speed. Stephan Fleet, the visual effects supervisor, said they made more than 100 versions of the shot as he, Kripke and Trachtenberg discussed the nuances of the moment.
“We certainly tried versions where there was more of her, like you could physically see her head or her face in it,” Fleet said. They ultimately landed on what Kripke described as “this sort of weirdly beautiful abstract ballet of goo.” In doing so, they announce just how gnarly the show is going to be.
The whale crash (Season 2, Episode 3)
After the Deep (Chace Crawford), an Aquaman-like superhero, accidentally kills a dolphin in the first season, the writer Craig Rosenberg was determined to top that in the second, Kripke said. He wanted a whale. Once Rosenberg found a way for it to have thematic significance — Hughie has a panic attack while literally inside the belly of a whale — Kripke signed on.
In the sequence, the Deep tries to block the Boys as they flee in a speedboat. Instead Butcher drives right through the Deep’s aquatic ride.
Fleet said that when the writers described the idea, “I was like, ‘That seems really hard and too expensive to do for the show, so I’d recommend not doing it.” But the team forged ahead, building a big whale puppet with anatomically correct insides, shooting on Lake Ontario and using visual effects to make the crash and spurting blood look realistic.
An unfortunate sneeze (Season 3, Episode 1)
In Season 2, “The Boys” built a life-size whale. In Season 3, they built an 11-foot penis. That was for one of the most notorious set pieces in which a superhero called Termite (Brett Geddes), who has the ability to shrink himself, jumps into another man’s urethra, an inventive supe sex act. But when Termite then accidentally sneezes, he reverts suddenly to full size and splits his partner in two.
Termite’s resemblance to Marvel’s Ant-Man was intentional: The writers wanted to parody a hero they hadn’t tackled before. An internet theory about “Avengers: Endgame” held that Ant-Man could have defeated the evil Thanos by jumping inside and blowing him up. “We were like, Why don’t we just do it, and we can show the thing that Marvel can’t show you,” Kripke said.
Fleet said he hadn’t been worried about the outlandish content but rather about how to render a tiny person without having it look “cheesy.” As he researched how to shoot miniatures, the supervising stunt coordinator John Koyama mapped out Termite’s moves inside a cavern of makeshift flesh, simulated by pink bedsheets. Fleet had dealt with plenty of nudity on “The Boys,” but this scene was a new frontier.
“I like to think of it as the most unprecedented thing I’ve ever done for television,” he said.
An ice show gone wrong (Season 4, Episode 3)
“Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas” wasn’t the first musical number on “The Boys.” But it was the first one on ice in which panicked performers get sliced to pieces. As Homelander tries to attack Hughie, who is spying from the ceiling of the arena, he accidentally zaps one of the skaters in half with his eye lasers, and the others are maimed by their fellow dancers’ blades.
The initial concept was Disney on Ice with “insane, sort of fascist right wing” messaging, Kripke said. After the composer Christopher Lennertz wrote the song and the choreographer Amy Wright worked out the steps, Koyama envisioned worst case scenarios with his stunt team.
“The blades are very sharp, they are going to cut,” Koyama said. “So what can they cut? Fingers off. Let’s lop some fingers off.”
A celebrity blood bath (Season 5, Episode 5)
Evan Goldberg, an executive producer, had long wanted “The Boys” to gather as many celebrities in a room and have a superhero kill them all, including his creative partner and fellow executive producer Seth Rogen. In the show’s last season, Kripke finally had a story line in which that made sense.
In the episode, which premiered on Wednesday — spoilers start now — Homelander and his ally Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) come to the Los Angeles home of Mr. Marathon, a washed-up supe played by Jared Padalecki, Ackles’s former “Supernatural” co-star. (They are trying to track down a rare substance that can make a superhero immortal.) Mr. Marathon is hosting a card game played by Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Will Forte and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. When he begins battling Soldier Boy, Mr. Marathon accidentally murders his guests by running through them, as A-Train did to Robin. In this case the gore is even more abundant and played entirely for laughs.
Because they were filming on location in a mansion with limits on how much corn syrup-based blood they could throw around, Fleet had to orchestrate the massacre mostly with postproduction effects. By now he is an expert in the art of what he calls “carnal realism.”
“We love colon in our show,” he said. “A lot of organs, if you blow them up, like a liver or a kidney or something, they just look like little weird balls in the air. You don’t really know what they are. But you take intestines or a colon and you get these kind of snaky things flying by, and it works great.”
For Kripke, it felt appropriate to go out in a storm of celebrity guts. “This is our last shot,” he said. “You want to go big or go home.”
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