The Boys has a pretty vocal fandom, and not everyone seems to understand what series creator Eric Kripke is going for. The latest issue is so-called “filler episodes,” which Kripke has seen complaints of during the past couple of weeks. While The A.V. Club‘s Saloni Gajjar was generally positive toward last week’s “One-Shots,” calling it “a much-needed dose of energy” and “season five’s weirdest, most entertaining hour,” plenty of fans seemed bored by it, which rubs Kripke the wrong way.
“None of the things that happen in the last few episodes will matter if you don’t flesh out the characters,” Kripke says in a new interview with TV Guide. “I’m getting a lot of online dissatisfaction, to put it politely. And I’m like, ‘What are you expecting? Are you expecting a huge battle scene every episode?'” Not only does the budget not allow for that, but “it would be so empty and dull, and it would just be about shapes moving without having any import.” As he explains, “We have something like 14 characters, maybe 15. And I owe it to all of them… to flesh them out and humanize them and their stories.”
But then again, there’s a certain subsection of The Boys that has long seemed to miss the point, whether willfully or not. “Some people who watch it think Homelander is the hero. What do you say to that?” Kripke wondered in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter during the show’s fourth season. “The show’s many things. Subtle isn’t one of them. So if that’s the message you’re getting from it, I just throw up my hands.” Kripke opined then that “The Boys is a show about celebrity politics and late-stage capitalism,” which you can only make at all effectively by doing some character work.
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