Hit superhero series The Boys is the reason why Prime Video established a Standards and Practices department, showrunner Eric Kripke revealed.
The Boys is known for its exaggerated take on superheroes and for heavily featuring graphic violence and sexually explicit scenes. Although the show – which just returned for its third stint – often attracts praise from fans, showrunner Eric Kripke has revealed the NSFW nature of the show prompted Amazon to establish a Standards and Practices department for its Prime Video service.
Standards and Practices departments are typically standard practice for most media companies to ensure that shows are basically not crossing the line.
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Speaking with TVLine, Kripke explained how the streaming service formed the department, partly because of the shows heavy use of adult content. He said: "I still remember the call, which [was] like, 'Can you guys come in? Because we have to start a Standards & Practices department,' in part because of us.
"It was [our] Season 1 and then I think there was like one other show that caused a problem for them. I'll wear it as a badge of honour that I helped start their Standards department."
Kripke also admitted that one particular explicit scene between Chace Crawford's The Deep and an octopus marked the first time the showrunner struggled to receive approval from Sony and Amazon, as it set off 'a lot of alarm bells at a lot of different levels at Amazon.'
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"For some crazy reason, Standards has a policy against bestiality. They're so uptight, really," Kripke joked.
He explained how he eventually got the green light for the scene: "My pitch to them was always like it’s so absurd [that] it wouldn’t be out of place in a Farrelly brothers movie. So it’s hard to call it prurient bestiality. It’s ridiculous. To my knowledge, I don’t even think octopi have orifices down there. So there was a lot of discussion of like what are the shots, and what can we do and what can we get away with?”
The showrunner previously discussed the notorious scene from the 'Herogasm' episode, pointing out the writers are always concerned about taking things too far.
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"Internally, the writers are really wringing their hands over all of it. As crazy and as insane as the show is, we sincerely worry a lot about being exploitative and gratuitous, and making sure that it feels like a heightened show and not like soft-core porn on late-night cable, you know? So we worry about it a lot," he said.
Despite, the hesitancy from Amazon, the showrunner explained that nothing was cut from the scene for being too explicit, instead cuts were made because of time and money. "We just couldn’t pull off all the gags we wanted to pull off," he added.
The Boys was first released in 2019 and is based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, with the over-the-top superhero series boasting an impressive 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Shiala Mahmood