Eric Kripke makes long genre television about families, real or improvised, tested by monsters, and he makes it well. The Boys is his sharpest idea and his loudest; the weakness, there and elsewhere, is knowing when a joke has been told.
Fi1m perspective
The Seven, the flagship superhero team of Vought in The Boys (2019), film adverts in the morning and do as they please in the afternoon. That is most of what Eric Kripke does. He takes a figure from genre, a ghost, a monster, a man in a cape, gives it an employer or a family, and watches how everyone behaves. He has said the show began by asking what Superman would be like in the real world. The answer is Antony Starr's Homelander, a great television monster, and he frightened us more than anything with teeth has for years, because Vought knows exactly what he is and keeps paying him.
Kripke started with short films in the late 1990s and the screenplay for the horror film Boogeyman (2005). The same year he created Supernatural, about family, monsters and the end of the world, and ran it for five seasons with Robert Singer producing and directing before stepping back to consultant; the programme went on without him until 2020. Revolution (2012–2014) was a post-apocalyptic adventure with a premise and not much momentum after it. Timeless (2016–2018), co-created with Shawn Ryan, showed his habit of research, each period done properly. In between he wrote The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018), from a book he had loved as a child.
Then The Boys, made with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg producing and sometimes directing, which ran five seasons of eight episodes to 2026 and produced the spin-off Gen V. Kripke has said that television, cooked right down, is "the character business", and that is why his series last: whatever the monster, at the centre there are people with a bond, brothers or an improvised family, and the threat is there to test it. In The Boys the bond is between the handful of ordinary people who decide to do something about Vought, and it is the part of the show we came back for.
What he does less well is stop. The Boys is cruder than it is clever and it runs long; it has one joke, that a company owns its heroes, and by the fifth season the satire had grown louder and the response to it more divided. Revolution had the opposite problem, an idea that never got going. His producer credit on The Adjustment Bureau (2011) tells us little; that film is George Nolfi's, and its romance is the good part.
Judge him by the television, and by the first two or three seasons of anything he makes, which is where his premises are sharpest and his characters still have somewhere to go. He has spent twenty years asking what monsters would be like with a payroll or a brother. The next question is whether he has another question.
Biography
Eric Kripke is an American writer, director and television producer. Born on 24 April 1974 in Toledo, Ohio, he graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. He began his career directing short films and writing for the series Tarzan (2003) before writing the screenplay for the film Boogeyman (2005).
Kripke created the long-running series Supernatural (2005–2020) and served as its showrunner for the first five seasons. He later created or co-created Revolution (2012–2014) and Timeless (2016–2018). Since 2019 he has been the showrunner, writer and occasional director of The Boys (2019–) for Amazon Prime Video, and he developed the spin-off Gen V (2023–).
