You can feel the change in the air, and it’s not merely because of wildfires and summer-like temperatures. The number of media demises is also atypically high this week, and it’s not just among entities associated with CBS. On a more personal level, this website’s section of brands I’ve been personally associated with took yet another hit, and I’m even less thrilled about that then I am losing a late night TV destination.
Yesterday saw the final episode of THE BOYS drop on Prime Video, and in certain circles this was as big a deal as Stephen Colbert’s departure. Among those was the ever-opinionated Paul Tassi of FORBES:
After an extremely uneven final season of The Boys, the final question was how on earth it would all be wrapped up in a single, hour-long series finale. There were fears that if it didn’t stick the landing, we’d once again be making Game of Thrones comparisons, or the recently flubbed Stranger Things ending. But in the end, The Boys pulled it off. It was good enough, if not quite good, in fact, and a worthy ending for the diabolical series.
Representing the more dissatisfied faction was DEN OF GEEK’s Kirsten Howard:
I could sit here and go over all the ways that this season of The Boys has been disappointing, but I’ve touched on basically all of them in my previous episodic reviews. The only other thing that’s been bugging me is how small this season has felt, given its stakes. Most scenes have taken place inside on set, with two or three characters sharing dialogue. Occasionally, the show has ventured out to a field, a beach, a street, or a wooded area for a bit. But aside from the Freedom Camp-set premiere, it feels like the show’s been pretty tight with its budget. I guess I was always wondering whether Prime Video had given the makers of The Boys fewer bucks to spend on its much-touted final season or whether they were saving the bucks they had for their big finale. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m frankly none the wiser.
As someone who is intimately familiar with how and why these decisions are made, I can assure Howard that her hunches are accurate. THE BOYS was supposed to be a true game changer for Sony and Prime Video, both of whom had been on the outside looking in on the superhero worlds that Marvel, DC, Disney and HBO Max had been seeking to build when the streaming wars were intensifying way back in 2019. And indeed its first season performed admirably for the invested parties, especially in the metrics of social media conversation that I was working on when it launched. I took immense pride in being able to share that success with folks like Eric Kripke, who I had come to know with my association with his lamentably short-lived TIMELESS that he collaborated on with the prolific Shawn Ryan. I’ve mused about that in the past, and I even made a personal showing at the kind of buzzy pop-up events that Sony once liberally budgeted for. Alas, likes and shares don’t always translate to incremental revenue, and in this case THE BOYS eventually devolved into a nichier. almost underground like appeal that was ultimately no more revolutionary than, say, PREACHER, a decent but now forgotten AMC original that also ate up a disproprtionate amount of Sony money and didn’t fully offer a return on the level of investment.
RADIO TIMES’ James Hibbs shared some of Kripke’s post-mortem with his international readers earlier this morning:
The finale saw dramatic deaths for both Homelander and Butcher, with the former being de-powered by Kimiko before Butcher killed him with a crowbar, and the latter being killed by Hughie to stop him releasing the Supe-killing virus. Speaking with Variety, Kripke said that Hughie and Butcher’s ending had been known since “the very start of the series”, and it is a “reasonably faithful” representation of what happens in the comic.
Meanwhile, he said that “we 100% knew that Butcher was going to kill Homelander with a crowbar. I’m not sure we totally knew where or when or how, but we just knew that was going to happen.” As for the happier endings for some of the heroes, Kripke said: “It’s this notion that I’ve been saying from the beginning, which is I see the show as hopeful but it doesn’t come without pain, sacrifice and failure. Nothing will ever be perfect.
Certainly not in a world that at the time of my earlier musing seemed primed for an infinitely fertile petri dish of spin-offs. TV LINE’s Meaghan Darwish reminded her readers of those realities while simultaneously trying to keep hope alive:
As fans know by now, Gen V, the college-set spinoff series, was canceled after two seasons, but several of the characters appeared in The Boys‘ finale. Is there room for them in another show down the line?…The Boys, as a series, may be over, but the world itself will continue to be a part of the TV landscape as Eric Kripke and crew expand the universe with the forthcoming series Vought Rising.
“I think that there’s a really interesting map out there now in this post-Homelander world because you have Vought disavowing a lot of their superheroes and throwing them out into the street, and so suddenly you have all of these superpowered beings, almost like loose nukes, right?” Kripke points out.
S0 there is at least a little more life left in this baby, as there also is with another show I worked on that ended its own lengthy run earlier this month. Several nameless EVOLVE editors took note in a piece that dropped late last week:
The ending of Outlander takes place during the Battle of Kings Mountain, the same battle where Frank Randall’s historical records claimed Jamie Fraser would die. Throughout the finale, Jamie prepares himself for that fate, but after the battle concludes, he survives, leading Claire to emotionally declare, “Frank was wrong!” However, the victory is short-lived. A captured British commander later pulls out a hidden pistol and shoots Jamie. Claire rushes to his side as he dies and refuses to leave him. The scene implies that she also dies beside him on the battlefield. In the final moments, the episode shows Claire and Jamie lying motionless following a montage of their relationship throughout the series. Just before the ending cuts out, both characters suddenly take deep breaths. This leaves the meaning of the finale and their ultimate fate open to interpretation.
OUTLANDER was never more than a guilty pleasure for an even more select sector of fandom–once dispropriately upscale and throughly counter to the demography that drives much of STARZ’ upstart subscriber base. Its own prequel spinoff BLOOD OF MY BLOOD debuted with a thud last summer in advance of this spring’s final rodeo for the OG version and while a second season was (shock!) a given it’s not even meriting a summer and/or Emmy window nor is its YA and ethnic-chasing management starting a drumroll for it. That said, it was popular enough with cultural elites that it tile sure looked good on my homepage.
And as May heads for a close that means two more direct connections to my Sony days have ceased to exist. Summer is supoosed to present new opportunities; and I remain at least mildly optmistic some may indeed lie in waiting for myself and for the few who still remain at Sony to fight further battles that don’t involve anime or Playstaion. But they’re mostly works in progress at this point with nothing guaranteed. Pretty much what the world in general feels like these days. Ain’t that right, Homelander?
Until next time…