We’re less than a month away from The Boys Season 4 and the return of the supe-slaughtering Billy Butcher and his team.
I’m already pretty excited about this because The Boys has been (quite literally) bloody brilliant so far. Across three seasons, it’s balanced sensational satire with violence, so gooey and gorey it would make horror movie master Tobe Hooper mutter, “You’re going a bit far there.”
Yet, as great as the show’s been, I must confess I have a niggling worry growing at the back of my head (and no, it’s not a tumor caused by me abusing Temp-V). You see, before anyone’s even had their mince pies (as Billy would say) on The Boys Season 4, it’s already been confirmed that the superhero TV show will be back for a fifth outing.
That isn’t exactly bad news, but it has got my spider sense tingling (again, it’s intuition, not a Temp-V tumor), and I’m worried that showrunner Eric Kripke might be about to repeat a mistake I believe he made with his last show, Supernatural.
Carry on, my wayward son…
For those who’ve never seen Supernatural, the conceit was simple enough. Sam and Dean Winchester are brothers and supernatural hunters who travel across the good ol’ US of A. As they ride from town to town, they track down monsters, demons, and all the terrible things that go bump in the night.
Eventually, the brothers learn they have a grander destiny in store. They’re, in fact, the prophesied vessels for the archangels Michael and Lucifer and are meant to usher in the end of the world. This epic story of angels and armageddon played out across five wonderful seasons of television before coming to a natural conclusion in the epic Season 5 finale, “Swan Song,” which saw Sam sacrifice himself to give Dean a normal life.
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And then it just carried on (Editor’s Note: My wayward son?). Yes, despite Sam and Dean’s story coming to a natural end in Season 5 (and Kripke quitting as showrunner as he’d told the story he wanted to tell), the CW who aired the show green-lit it for a sixth season… then a seventh… and then an eighth.
They’ll be peace when you are done…
Supernatural ended up running for 10 more seasons before finally flopping into the grave, a desiccated and exhausted husk of itself, after its 15th Season. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the quality fell off as the show’s writers fought desperately to keep the show going, long after the story that made it so compelling had ended. As a result, Supernatural ended up rehashing old ideas, introducing ludicrously powerful villains, and becoming increasingly meta.
By the time it finished, Supernatural had become a parody of itself, feeling more like incoherent fan fiction than an actual TV show. And while I admit there’s a joy to be found in the later seasons — I’ve always had a fondness for Season 6’s The French Mistake, and Season 15’s finale, “Carry On,” has its moments — I can’t help but think if Supernatural had stuck to that five season arc Kripke initially planned it would be considered one of the best TV shows of all time.
Lay your weary head to rest…
So, to take this back to The Boys, I hope Kripke has a plan to end the show. I’d presumed that Billy’s abuse of Temp-V and terminal illness meant Season 4 would be the final chapter in Butcher’s tale, and while I’m happy to see what the future has in store for The Boys, I hope the show doesn’t run too long and become a parody of itself in the process. So Eric, if you’re reading this, take some advice I was given as a youth: always leave a party when you’re having the most fun because it’s probably only going downhill from there.
If you love The Boys and want to know more about this wonderful world, check out our guides breaking down the Gen V cast and everything we know about Gen V Season 2. That’s not all, though. We’ve also got a tonne of articles on Prime Video’s other hit series, Invincible. So far, we’ve written exhaustive pieces on the Invincible cast and Invincible Season 3, plus we had a lot of fun ranking the strongest Invincible characters. Finally, why not give our list of the 50 best superhero movies a quick look? We have a few hot takes on there that would make Iceman feel hot.
