Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: the boys

The Boys Showrunner Defends Feeling "Anxious" About Series Finale

In a rare response on social media, The Boys Showrunner Eric Kripke made it clear why you want him feeling "anxious" about the series finale.

"Excites is the wrong word. What makes me most … anxious about the final season is really hoping we land the plane. It's super hard to do a finale. Fans will retroactively judge the show based on how they feel about the finale. If we stiff it, they will definitely say, 'Well, that show wasn't as good as we thought it was.' And it's almost like you're trying to secure your legacy with these finales. And it's the first finale I've ever done, too — so it's not like I have any experience with it. So I'm mostly anxious and girding my loins." That's what The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke had to share with The Hollywood Reporter during a recent interview, when asked what excited him the most about the final run.

What you just read? That's exactly what I want to hear coming from the showrunner of one of my favorite series. I want to know they're stressing every second of the flight, up to and including the plane's (hopefully) smooth, successful landing. That means they give a shit – that they actually care. We've seen way too many examples of it in the past: the beloved show that seems to be ending on a strong note, only to shit the bed with the finale episode. Also, this Eric Kripke we're talking about here – the dude lives and breathes television. If there was anyone who should be teaching a graduate-level course on the realities of working in television, it's him.

So, when someone takes his words and warps them into an implication that Kripke knows the series finale is a disappointment and that he's trying to soften the blow for viewers by getting out ahead of it and spreading the blame, we're glad to see Kripke pause his rule about not directly responding to trash on social media to shut down that nonsense. "I make a rule never to respond but: you want a showrunner who's anxious & obsessing over every detail cause they want it to be great! A writer who is 'I nailed that shit' confident is usually a bad writer. Ok, vanishing back into the hedge Homer style," Kripke posted, reminding everyone that he has just as much invested as an artist in the series and its legacy as anyone else.

The Boys: Eric Kripke Feels "A Fair Amount of Terror" About Finales

During Sony's "Creator to Creator" podcast, Kripke and Shawn Ryan (The Night Agent) had a chance to share what life is like as a showrunner, and if there were two people who have the resumes to have this conversation, it's Kripke and Ryan. Beginning at around the 33:50 mark in the clip above, Kripke reveals his mindset in terms of crafting a series finale that remains true to the show's creative vision while satisfying the faithful viewers. "I am in a fair amount of terror about a series finale," Kripke shared. "You can count in one, maybe two hands, the truly great series finales… the graveyard is literally filled with terrible series finales."

Kripke continued, "How do you tie up the stories? How do you do it in a way that is emotional and satisfying? How do you do it in a way that creates — frankly — the illusion that some detail that you dropped in Season 1 or Season 2 is now suddenly coming back to pay off?" He continued," You could have the greatest show for years, but if you stiff that ending, and that's what's sending everyone out in the parking lot, they go, 'Oh, maybe that show wasn't that good'."

Regarding series finales that hit and hit hard, Kripke shared what he learned from writers and how they approached the lead-up to Breaking Bad S05E16: "Felina" (written and directed by series creator Vince Gilligan). "'Breaking Bad,' to me, is as good as a show gets, and I was able to ask some of those writers, I'm like, 'The way you tied everything together, how did you do that?' And they said, 'Oh, we had just a list of loose ends on our board that we had no idea what to do with them, that we would keep compiling over the seasons. And then when it came time to do the final season, we would just start checking them off of like, how do we pay them off, cuz we're gonna look like geniuses because the Season 2 storyline becomes this.'"

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