The Boys has been generating plenty of fan debate for its final season.
But there’s no arguing the fifth season’s popularity.
The season has reached 57 million viewers per episode globally. That’s the highest yet for the series despite only five weeks of data, according to Prime Video (using a standard that measures people watching at least a few minutes of each episode). The season also ranks among the Top 10 most-viewed seasons of any Prime Video original series, and drove the streamer’s largest three week ratings surge of any show or movie.
The news comes amid some online backlash over the show’s storylines, with some comparing the show to the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Some say the show has been sluggishly paced with too much “filler” in the lead up to this week’s series finale.
Showrunner Eric Kripke tells The Hollywood Reporter that he found assurance in the Prime Video ratings after paying close attention to the online chatter in recent weeks.
“I’ve gone through a journey when I first started to read everything — like on social media or online — and it starts to feel like that’s the whole universe, and it feels scary, and you have a pit in your stomach,” Kripke says. “So then [you see the ratings and] you’re like, ‘Oh, obviously, how many times do I have to relearn the lesson that the online world is not the actual world?’ [The online reaction is] a fraction of very loud, opinionated people, and God love them. They’re welcome to have that opinion. But it’s actually not reflecting what’s happening out in the world. And once I saw [the numbers], I calmed right down.”
Given the show has more than a dozen major characters, Kripke has said the writers have tried to navigate giving each character a meaningful story with a proper ending.
“None of the things that happen in the last few episodes will matter if you don’t flesh out the characters,” Kripke recently told 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?’ At no point during the writing of it was I like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re making filler episodes. So who cares?’ We all thought at the time we’re really getting these important character details. We have something like 14 characters, maybe 15. And I owe it to all of them — in that television is the character business — I owe it to all of them to flesh them out and humanize them and their stories.”
The Boys has its series finale — which runs slightly more than an hour — on Wednesday. The season has also helped set up an upcoming prequel series, Vought Rising, which will premiere next year.
