Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, this is John. Today's episode has even a little bit more swearing than usual, so standard warning about that. ♪♪
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you plan for a multi-season TV series, and how do you wrap it up at the end? Our guest today is the creator and showrunner of shows such as Supernatural, Revolution, Timeless, Gen V, and of course, The Boys, which is back for its final season. Welcome, Eric Kripke. Hey, thanks, John. Thrilled to be here. Now, the fourth season of The Boys premiered last June, but you are now working on the fifth and final season, so I want to talk to you about that.
but I'd also love to get more granular on the process of developing a show, breaking scripts and seasons. We also have listener questions on bottle episodes and using the conventions of comic books.
And in our bonus segment for premium members, let's talk about blood because you use an astonishing amount of blood on The Boys of Gen V. I'd love to discuss what you've learned about blood on the page and blood in practice. Amazing. I'm in for all of that. So before we get into the details on how shows work on the inside, can we talk a little bit about your background here? Because how early in your development did you know that you wanted to do television versus features? What's the backstory? Pitch us, Eric Kripke. Okay.
I was raised in Toledo, Ohio. I was one of those kids. I think it was E.T. in 83. I was nine. And I came home from E.T. and told my mom, you know, did somebody make that?
And she said, yes. And I said, well, then that's what I want to do. So I was like the very prototypical 80s Spielberg obsessed, that particular subspecies of kid. And there's a lot of us in sort of that age range who like those were the important movies. The Spielberg movies were the ones like, oh my gosh, that is the vision I have. Or that's how you get the J.J. Abrams sort of emulating that model. Yeah. And like, and it's so funny looking back
how few of them he actually wrote or directed. Like, you look back and you're like, well, that was actually Richard Donner and that was actually Joe Dante and that was actually, you know, Tobe Hooper with apparently a very heavy assist from Spielberg, according to legend. But, like, it's funny when you're like, oh, he was just, he was, I mean, producing is a big job, obviously, but, like, those
Those weren't actually his movies. Yeah. Anyway, that's just fascinating to me. So I was that kid. I'd say by the time I was 11, I wanted to go to the USC film school because it was the only film school whose name makes its way back to Toledo, Ohio. I found the short story that I wanted my senior thesis...
to be when I was 13 in a Twilight Zone magazine written by Richard Matheson. And I like carried it around with me and wrapped plastic. I took it with me to camp and college and,
Anyway, and cut forward, and I went to USC, and I made that movie my senior year. And my goal was to be a director for features and feature comedies. Yeah. So I made short films and was unemployed and the usual thing. And then my shorts were in Sundance and Slamdance at the same year. And then we won Slamdance and...
Okay, now I have an agent and now I'm able to like pick up like bad open writing assignments and
Which they were giving away a lot more like candy back then than they are today. Let me pause you for one second because we have a link here to Battle of the Sexes, which was a short film that you got into Sundance. Was that also at Slamdance? Another one, Truly Committed, was at Slamdance, but Battle of the Sexes was at Sundance, yes. And so I look at the short and it's like, oh, I can see this is a person who wants to be a director and wants to make a certain kind of movie because it's a very well-executed single-premise concept.
Oh, thank you. I'm thrilled and stunned that you watched it, but yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's six minutes, so it's not a huge burden on anyone's time, but it was a very good calling card for that specific kind of director who wants to do a thing. Rossen Thurber, who was my assistant, he also made a short film coming out of the USC program, but then a second short film, which was
Terry Tate office linebacker, which sort of kicked him off his career. It's a good way to announce yourself to the town. And was that the intention behind these short films is to land yourself representation? Yeah. I mean, the main thing, and I know Rawson, he's a great guy. Yeah. The main thing at the time was make a short film that,
And have the feature length version of that film as a script ready to go. And that's the best way to get yourself into the director's chair at a young age while you're in your 20s. That was sort of the, like, that's what you do.
So what was the intention for like Battle of the Sexes? Like here's the short and did you have a screenplay that went along with it? I did. I did. There's a Battle of the Sexes feature length screenplay that is only moderately successful. And I took it out, you know, like I got an agent. I had a good short film. People wanted to have meetings. Yeah.
You know, I took out that script and every single person who read it was like, yeah, no. Like, what other scripts do you have? Yeah. And I had nothing. So I totally blew my moment. Like, I had that month where I was taking, you know, eight meetings a week and nobody liked the script because it is a very sloppy script.
I had to really learn writing from doing it. I don't feel like I was an innately gifted writer. I always felt I was better at filmmaking. Let's talk about the difference between, so like something like Battle of the Sexes is essentially a sketch. I mean, it's something like, it's a long version of what could be a Siren Live sketch. Yes.
And we've had a couple of writers on the show to talk about sort of the difference between sketch writing and writing longer projects, writing a pilot, writing a feature for sure, is that there's a sense of ongoing development. It's not just a complication upon the premise, it's really a journey that the characters go on. And that's not a natural progression sometimes from the sketch forward. It's a very different thing. We had Simon Rich on and we were talking about sort of, he writes short stories and stories
that are short and tight and deliver the payload that they're expecting for that small form. But it's not what a feature script does. It's not what a pilot does. It's not setting up a whole world, which you end up having to learn how to do. So how did you learn how to go from this and sort of the script that wasn't working to this?
you know, Supernatural or other shows you were writing? Through failure. I mean, I really feel that I learned what to do through process of elimination. Like, I failed every other way until I figured out, like, oh, this actually works. This gets a response. And, you know, and everyone has their own process. But for me...
What really landed was two things. You know, everyone says character-driven, but almost nobody means it. And because you have to walk the walk. And what I learned was the stories were hanging together better when...
I started with, okay, who's this person and what do they want? Where do they start and where do they end? Yeah. And then, okay, what are the steps that get them there psychologically? Why do they feel that way? And then, okay, now, at least for TV. Yeah. And okay, now what's the plot that illuminates those beats? Yeah. Yeah.
And it wasn't until I landed there that things started to cook. And then the second one was, which I think is a mistake a lot of young writers make, and you know maybe better than anybody with the stuff you've written, but like, you just have to be so brutal with your internal logic. And you have to be air fucking tight. And...
The Battle of the Sexes script, for example, failed because it was sloppy world building. You know, I set up rules in the beginning that were not consistent through the end. And you really have to look at it as does this particular beat, does this particular line, does this particular reference fit in the
the rules of the world you've created. And if they do not, you have to get rid of them. I don't care how good that line or character or moment is. It's a cancer to the credibility of the world you're trying to create.
let's pull this back. So, Battle of the Sexes, for people who haven't watched the little short film yet, the premise is that when women go off to the restroom, they're actually entering into a sort of secret lab where they can do deep forensics on the person, the man that they're talking with and figure out whether they should continue the conversation or pull away from the conversation. And it's incredibly heightened. It's incredibly like, you know, Mission Impossible level stuff happens inside that space. And in a
sketch, it's funny that we buy it because like the world expectations are not so high. And I can imagine in the course of a feature like film or if this was the premise to a TV show, like,
building that up so the rest of the world actually made sense would be challenging. Yeah. I mean, it might be doomed from the beginning, and the first 20, 25 pages of that script are the best, and then it falls apart. But it's like this idea of a guy who's chasing a girl, and the obstacle is this secret network of women that are all in communication with each other to sort of secretly run the world. Yeah.
By the way, like not wildly different than Angelina Jolie's agency in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Yeah. You know, like not that different, but like, but by the end it became like every woman on the planet and it was just too big and it should have just been a woman spy spying for her. It should have been Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
You know, that was the best version of this idea in the way that like, you know, Brad Pitt has like Vince Vaughn and he's riding around in a dune buggy and she's very like fastidious and neat. And like, those are the right energies. Yes. But it was contained and I didn't understand containment and I didn't understand...
the logic exercise where you have to take everything to its nth degree and say, well, if that exists, then that means this, this, this, and this. And is that okay for your story? And obviously every woman involved in a conspiracy raises way too many problems. And so the entire thing, I mean, look, I was 25 when I wrote it, but like,
everything just melted by the end of that. And so everyone who read it was like, it really started promising and then it went off the rails and never went back on.
Yeah, just to be honest with you, yes. Yes, yeah, yeah. Now, so talk about the steps of learning between that and something like Supernatural. Were you staffing on other TV shows? Were you getting other deals to do stuff? What was happening? So I mostly blew my moment of getting any sort of feature directing going. So then I took a couple open writing assignments for comedies because I thought I was going to be a comedy filmmaker eventually.
They were all horrible scripts. They never got made. And I was like banging around for like three years, just being like one of those guys who like never gets anything made and just that Twilight Zone. And I read one of the scripts and it's like, you can see...
someone struggling to learn something, but it's terrible. They were terrible. So it turns out, like, I wanted to be a comedy writer, but it turns out I sucked at it, you know? And plus, like, the tyranny of, like, multiple jokes per page just was something that I had a... I just couldn't do. I just was really bad at... You know, the people that are good at it are so good at every other line is a killer. And I...
couldn't do that. I needed more buildup. I just didn't have that muscle. So then my agent was like, well, why don't you take a TV meeting? And, you know, this was...
2002? Like, TV then is not what TV is now. Like, TV then, like, my film school friends were like, oh, you're going to go do TV. Well, you know, good luck. Good luck. You know, I always saw you as a TV person, and I'm like, fuck you. Like, that was kind of the vibe, right? And so I went to take a TV meeting. They liked Battle of the Sexes. Here's something that'll also tell you how different the time was. I was...
A 27-year-old kid? I walked into that meeting. Based on Battle of the Sexes alone, they offered me the Wonder Woman series. Oh, my. And I passed. Incredible. I said, yeah, Wonder Woman's not really my thing. No, passed. Just shows you how different IP was then. But then they said, would you be interested in writing a pilot? And I tried, and I wrote a pilot.
and it didn't go anywhere, but they liked it. And then my break was, they were trying, Smallville was a big deal on the WB. And friends of mine who've been on the show, Alan Miles, they created Smallville. And so, and they were also out of USC and it's like, you know, I felt like, oh, is it sad that you're doing TV? But no, it was a giant hit. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, but at the time, and this show was, the story I'm about to tell is about a huge failure, is they were trying to recreate it with Tarzan.
Yeah. And they couldn't break Tarzan. They couldn't figure it out. And they had big writers and, you know, it's a big title. Yeah. And I said, let me take a crack at it. Yeah. And I had the winning pitch. And then I wrote a script and they loved the script. And...
Then I have David Nutter shooting my pilot all of a sudden. David Nutter's a giant TV director. He's who you want to do your pilot. The winningest pilot director in TV history in terms of more pilots picked up. And such a lovely guy. And...
He makes the show. The show's good. They pick it up to series. And suddenly, you know, they partnered me with somebody, but suddenly I'm a co-showrunner of a TV show at 28 years old. Yeah. Having never stepped into a writer's room before. So, Eric Rippey, I was in the same situation as a 28-year-old writer
creator of a TV show for the WB Network and I had a nervous breakdown. I completely melted down. So I'm sitting here, your show lasted eight episodes, mine lasted six. Wait, what was your show? I did the show DC. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like young people in DC and making it happen. I totally remember that. Yeah, so it was a post-Felicity show and, uh,
It was a good premise. It sold well, and I was excited to be doing it. And I just was completely out of my depth in the process. Were you partnered up with somebody who actually knew what they were doing? What was the situation? Yes. This writer named P.K. Simmons who had ran Party of Five and we're still friends to this day and is like such a lovely, lovely dude. I was partnered with him.
He encouraged me to try to make it creatively my own. He wasn't interested in taking it over. He wanted me to realize...
you know, whatever my vision was. I proceeded to make so many mistakes, like every mistake. I worked with, and I'm sure you did too, I worked with John Litvak. Mm-hmm. Did you work with John? The whole thing is kind of a blur to me. Like, literally, I can picture myself, but I'm sort of in the third person, like going through a situation that I wasn't actually present for. What?
Yeah, I mean, he was like this infamously hard executive at the WB. And to just give you one quick example of him, and like, you're just a kid and they don't teach you politics. Yeah. You know, and so he calls me on like day one, or he takes me to lunch on like day one of the job. And he's like, okay, look, here's what's going to happen.
you're going to slip me outlines and scripts before you show them to the studio. I'm going to give you the notes. You're going to revise them. And then you're going to show it to the studio, who's then going to show it to me, and I'm going to pretend to love it. And that's how this is going to fucking go. Do you understand me? And I was like, yes, sir.
I mean, so I was immediately immersed in espionage and slipping scripts. And then, you know, Laura Ziskin, who was the producer of it, found out and she was angry at me, but I didn't understand. It was just a disaster.
Yeah. And by the way, Tarzan shouldn't be a TV show. It was just, it was doomed from the start. Yeah, I want to try and travel back to you and tell you that because I also did a Tarzan movie for Warners. Oh, right. It's a very difficult character to center a story around.
In a feature, but as a TV show, dear Lord, you have a central character who we want to see shirtless, but can't be shirtless all the time, obviously. Right. Someone who's, by definition, low verbal, which makes things really challenging. It's just... It's a mess. What I got handed was, we want Tarzan in New York, you have to make Tarzan in New York work. Okay? It's a jungle out there. Right, exactly. I think it was literally the tagline. I'm sure it was, yeah. So my take was, make the show about James.
She's, you know, and she's a cop and whatever. But I'm like, there's a character you can relate to. And so it's like Beauty and the Beast. It's like this guy comes in and he saves her. Sleepy Hollow is a similar dynamic, yeah. But then we cast Travis Fimmel, you know, who went on to be pretty big in Vikings. And it's just nothing but raw charisma. And we cast him as Tarzan. He was a Calvin Klein model at the time. It was his first job. And so...
He's just got that thing. And so all the dials went to the right whenever he showed up on screen, the testing dials. Yeah. And so all the executives were like, well, he's the show. And I'm like, no, he's a monkey. Like, there's nothing...
Like, he doesn't know, like, well, maybe he gets a job. How about one episode where he gets a job? I'm like, he doesn't know what currency is. Like, you know, there's just nothing you can do except that he loves this girl and he wants to protect her. Yeah. And so anyway, it was a disaster. It was a mess. So let's fast forward, though, to Supernatural, which was not a mess, which was a tremendous success. So tell us about the...
of figuring out how to do Supernatural, not just what the premise was, but it feels like you approached that show with an idea of what that was going to be week to week in a very smart way. It wasn't just like, here's the pilot and we'll see what happens. You very much knew this is how the show wants to tell itself week after week. This is the central relationship. This is the kind of thing that happens in an episode. And was that clear from the very first pitch? No.
No, here's what was clear, which was one of the many lessons I walked out of Tarzan from was if you're going to make Tarzan,
a network show and do 22 of them, spend most of your time thinking about the engine. Yeah. And like, what's going to give you story every week that you can always go back to that well if you need to. Yep. And I happen to have been obsessed with urban legends. I still am. I like to collect them and study them and did in college. And so for me,
The engine was, okay, characters are investigating urban legends that all turn out to be real. That was the premise. I pitched a journalist. I pitched like a bad ripoff of Kolchak, where he like worked for like a tabloid and he was investigating. And I had a whole pitch and Warner Brothers, I pitched it to them, Susan Rovner, and
And she said, I really like the urban legend idea, but like the reporter thing's really boring. What else have you got? Yeah. And I had written in my notebook literally the day before, only two lines. I wrote, you know, one way you could do this story would be Route 66. Yeah.
And I said, well, I have a whole other version of this idea. I'm like, it's Route 66, and it's these two guys, and they're in a cool car, and they're driving around the country, and then on the spot said, and they're brothers, right?
Mm-hmm. Great. I still don't know why or where it came from. And she started leaning forward. She's like, ooh, a sibling relationship and a show about family. And, oh, I'm really interested. I'm like, great. Well, I have all those notes at home. Give me a week to just go home and get them. And then I'll come back. And I went back and I furiously wrote what ultimately became the pilot pitch of Supernatural. Yeah.
And the way I really, it's funny, it's like, thank God for those urban legends because that's how I learned structure. Yeah. They're such tight little jokes, really. And so to take these two characters and put them into those stories provided a structure that I really learned a lot about a beginning, a middle, a twist, and an end. Mm-hmm. Because I always had that to go back to. I very much learned how to write on the fly. Yeah.
Can we talk about Supernatural? Because it was a classic broadcast WB network show with commercial breaks. And so I'm assuming that as you're writing the pilot, but every given episode, you're really writing towards those act breaks. So those are the key moments of reversal that you're hanging your story on those points and then figuring out sort of how to get to those points in between. And that probably starts in the
The blue sky of the episode, and then, like, those are the moments you're listing on the whiteboard. Is that a five-act show? Is it a six-act show? I don't know what Werners was at that point. We started at four plus a teaser, and then they added another commercial break, and then after season two or three, it was five plus a teaser. So six acts, yeah. Yeah. In a 45-page script. Yeah.
Yeah, so it's really, you're racing between those moments. But once you accept that and you can sort of build off that, and crucially, once you have a show that can actually fit that structure, it's liberating. It's got to be just so nice. I loved it. And I have to tell you, like, I miss it in this kind of new streaming freeform thing. Like, the discipline...
of having something awesome happen every eight pages is a really smart discipline. And it's very, I think, instructive because you just... And to this day, I live in absolute terror of being boring because I hate the idea of going more than 10 minutes in anything without...
Someone saying, oh, shit, that's crazy because I had to do that because I needed you to come back after the deodorant commercial. Having too much structure was really great training ground that then you can kind of pull back a little bit. And like I'd say like for the boys now, we write like three act structure, but we are still really interested in structure. Yeah.
And structure saved my life. It's how I learned to do this. Like once you realized, oh, this is all just math, you know, like it's all like plant payoff, three or four character beats, you know, set up, twist, action, stuff.
wrap up, like once you realize it's all just beats that then you just blend together and then hide under dialogue and action and emotion and sex and love. But the mechanics of it, the erector set infrastructure of it is...
really predictable, that saved my life. Because I was like, oh, okay. And to this day, I care more about structure than anything because I think it's like a life preserver for me. Like the people who write independent shit, that they're just like, oh no, I hate structure. And I just want, it's a day in New York. Like that terrifies me. I don't know how to do that. I only know how to do
here are the four beats and here's how we're going to get from A to B. Yeah, so structure classically being when things happen. As you're moving forward in time, these are the things where it's going to encounter. But
The structure of television also kind of necessarily implies a structure of where things are going to happen. So Supernatural is a roadshow, but they happen to be just driving around the same places all the time. It's convenient that way. Right. With The Boys, it's been interesting to notice season by season, figuring out like, oh, what are your standing stats? Like, what are the places we're going to come back to? Because for Supernatural,
financial reasons, but also for narrative reasons, we need to have home bases from which people can move out. And so like there's this last season, maybe the season before, we have like this office building with windows all around it that it's like, that's a central set. We know we're going to come back to this place. It's a home base for the production, but also for the viewer to say like, okay,
I understand where we're at. We've come back around and these things have changed since the last time we were in this space. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, The Boys is actually the first show I've ever done that isn't some version of a roadshow. Yeah. So standing sets were actually pretty new to me and they're very useful. I mean, look, I have to say I find them more useful now
logistically, budgetarily as a producer than I find them necessarily narratively useful. Like just today, we're trying to bring down a budget of one of our episodes and we're like, well, let's move these three scenes onto our home sets and then we don't have to drive out or build them or whatever. To me, that's the value of home sets. I don't find myself...
watching something and like wishing that character went to that home set. I'd rather they didn't. I like the variety, life, that cinematic thing where like everything is different and beautiful and there's a variety is my own personal taste. Yeah. But you do need them and they have saved my ass on numerous occasions.
You mentioned that voice, you think of it as being three acts, four acts. As you're breaking an episode, what is the process? How many people do you have in the room? You probably started the season with a sketch of an idea of where things were headed. That came down into these are the episodes. But when you're actually focusing on an episode, how many beats are you looking for? When do you know you have enough and not too much for an episode and that someone can go off and start working on script? We start, there's about...
seven of us, seven plus me, so everybody gets an episode. You know, once we spend about a month at the top of the year talking about season-wide mythology and where we want the characters to go, whatever. Then when we start actually breaking the episode, we usually know, or at least are aiming for, here's where we have to build to this character moment or this plot turn or this step in the mythology. So we have that guide to start with.
And then we spend, you know, it takes about for us three, three and a half weeks to break an episode. We probably spend two of those weeks just talking through character psychology. What's the character thinking? Where do we want them to grow in this episode? What
What's the thing they want most in the world? What's the thing they're afraid of most in the world? How do we make the thing they're most afraid of stand in the way of the thing that they want? How does that relate to their childhood, whether it's on camera or not? And we're just talking, talking, talking, talking, trying to dig as deep as we can into the psychology. And eventually it coalesces around, I'd say per character, like three or four beats. All right. And...
They start here, they grow here, this throws something in their path, and then they end up there.
As this is within an episode, each character will have three or four beats. Yes. And that's assuming all characters are in all episodes. There may be obviously places where people are off, but you're also going to need to find ways, like, people are just not in their own scenes. They're in scenes with other people. So you want to make sure that the scenes they're in with other people are progressing both of their storylines. Right. One thing I learned as the show went on, because we have 14 main characters, right? And though we spend our time thinking emotionally about those characters...
I learned very quickly that, like, you need to double and triple people up into the same story. Yeah. Because there's just not enough. You can't have 14 separate stories in a one-hour show, and already we have too many storylines. Like, the biggest challenge of The Boys is there's too many stories. It's like Game of Thrones, you know, in a way, where, like,
Sometimes you want to just sit with a story longer than you can, but you have all of these other stories to service to keep the machine going. With this new season, at the end of last season, it's pretty common now to sort of burn down everything at the end of a season so that you can come back to the new season and start things over. But you did a very big burndown of everything at the end of this last season, and including our expectations about sort of what
is supposed to be happening. So in that first episode of the new season, which I've not seen yet, as we're recording this, how much are you thinking about getting the audience back up to speed? Are you expecting them to just start in the middle and figure out what's happening behind it? Those blue sky discussions must be a really important part of thinking about your season. You know, mileage varies and taste varies. I prefer throwing people into the middle of it and then slowly moving
revealing the information that got them there. Like, we like to play, we've done it a couple seasons now where we almost play a game of like, how do we reintroduce the character in the craziest place or the most unexpected place we can put them?
And then explain how they ended up there. You know, so like in season three, like Huey is in a suit and he's Butcher's boss. That's right. You know, and you're just like, what? Wait, I don't understand. And then you sort of realize, oh, he's working with Victoria Newman and he's the head of this, he's one of the co-heads of this agency. And you like tease it out so that by the end of the episode, they understand everything, but that you don't front load the exposition. If anything, you back load it.
I think that's more fun. So, you know, that's what we try to do. And that's how season five opens. I mean, look, it was really helpful that I had pre-negotiated with Sony and Amazon that they were going to allow me to end the show on my terms and that the fifth season was going to be the final season because that allows you to blow the doors off it, like you said, in the season four climax. Yeah.
Because you know you're not holding on any chips anymore. You can go all in. And that freedom allowed me to do the size of the finale that we were able to do that I don't think I could have done otherwise.
Well, also, you don't have to hold back any beats for characters that you were like, like, at some point, we want to talk about this aspect of Huey. We want to do this thing. Like, you know, at some point, Jim and Pam from The Office, you want to see them get married. But like, when are you going to do that? Right. It is very liberating to know the end of a thing. And beyond just the simple ones of like, you can kill people off, which is fun. But like...
You can also have them have conflict that is irreparable because you don't have to worry about bringing them back next season. You don't have to say, well, that's character assassination, you guys, and we still have to live with that character. Like, you don't have to do any of that. So it's very freeing. It's also super intimidating because you can count on one hand the amount of truly great series finales.
And the landscape is just littered with corpses of shows that did not stick the landing. Yeah. And that's a really intimidating... This is the first time I've been able to end a show. So this is my first stab at it. And so I'm appropriately terrified of, are we sticking the landing...
What do we need to do? Is it happening? Is it emotionally satisfying? You know, is it unexpected? Like, I lose a lot of sleep over trying to land this plane. So I'm not asking for any spoilers, but looking back to your decision process about the season, did that mean you really came into the room thinking about, okay,
what are the questions we want the series to answer? What are the payoffs that we as creators and as an audience are hoping to find in that and then working towards that? Or is it just, you really are reverse engineering a bit? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, again, structure is so important to me and I'm a little OCD and I just hate the idea of moving forward into a horizon that I don't know or understand. I want to know where I'm going.
So we talked about in the beginning of the season, we talked about the way I phrased it was like, okay, let's say all the action is over. And now it's like the 10 pages of wrap up, like set to like the slow part of Layla. Yeah. And what do we want to see?
who's alive, who's dead, the ones who are alive, what are they doing? Like, where do we want everyone to end up? Yeah. And we figured that out. Like, we figured out that final montage is one of the very early things. And then it was like, okay, so how do we get there?
What are your favorite series endings? What shows do you feel like actually really stuck the landing? Breaking Bad is an annoyingly good ending. Absolutely monster that Vince Gilligan, yeah. I mean, he's so annoying. Like, he's delivered two different shows that have never had a bad episode and both stuck the landing. And it's annoying how good he is.
Those are the two that really come to mind, Saul and Breaking Bad. Your description of the resolution and sort of like the song playing over it makes me think of Six Feet Under. Yeah, that's a great one. Yeah, really good. One of the best, actually. Where it's just like thematically like, oh, we're all going to die. This has been a show about death. We're all going to die. And let's look at how these characters die. Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. Six Feet Under is a great one.
But again, there's not many. I can't think of that many. Yeah. And it shows that we absolutely love where you look at the last episode. It's like, yeah, okay. Yeah. Okay. And like...
You know, you're sending people out into the parking lot with a bad taste in their mouth. Yes, exactly. You know, and it colors all the good work you did before it. Yeah, people's frustration with both the ending of Lost and the ending of Game of Thrones, it is weird how it retroactively makes people decide they didn't like the series. It's like, no, no, I can show you evidence that you loved this show. And when you think of the...
unbelievable undertaking to make those shows. Yeah. You know, like how hard those showrunners worked and the pages and pages of just top tier quality. Yeah. And because they didn't stick the landing...
everyone's like, yeah, I don't know about Lost. And you're like, oh my God, like that show changed television. Yeah. You know, and poor, poor Damon Lindelof who like has to write like essays about defending the ending. And you're like, dude, you made one of the great shows. So anyway, I'm, I'm really nervous.
Here's hoping you won't have to write essays defending the boys. Oh my God. Cut to my Hollywood Reporter op-ed piece of like why the boys made sense. Yes. Let's get to some listener questions. Drew, help us out. We have one here from Scott.
Scott writes, while a bottle episode is always locked to a particular location, is there a term for an episode that exclusively follows a particular character? Recent examples include the Severance episode that only featured Cobell and Saltzneck or the bear that was just all a Tina backstory. I can't think of a phrase I've ever heard used to describe this. Is there one you can think of or suggest? Eric, I was a little stumped for a term here too. It feels like a thing you actually just...
maybe describe, because we know what that is, but I haven't heard a common industry term for that. No, I haven't either. I mean, I've heard, funny enough, I've heard it about two people, you know, a two-hander. Oh, yeah. And obviously, I've heard bottle episode. I mean, the closest term I can think of that we actively use is it's a change-up, you know, because it's more about like...
what's your structural change-up from what normal structure of the episode is. Like, we're doing not particularly that, but we're doing a change-up this season where we just blow out our old structure and do a totally new one. So, change-up, I guess. We did them a lot on Supernatural. Yeah, a change-up makes sense. Side quest is also a thing. Just that sense of like, you know, you're taking one character outside of the main...
and letting them do a whole separate thing. There's a series I'm pitching where one of the episodes definitely does do that and actually tracks a bunch of things we've seen from a completely new perspective and point of view. And it's almost a convention at this point, but I have not heard one common expression for that. Whoever wrote that should pick the phrase. Pick the phrase. And make it happen. And they can give birth to it.
All right, we've got a question here from Ethan. Ethan writes, I'm working on a live-action script that pulls a lot from the visual language of comic books. I'm trying to do this in a nuanced way, not like Scott Pilgrim or Spider-Verse. I've cracked the formatting on some visual elements, like multiple panels in one shot, but something's stumping me. How would you write a quick change in color or background to emphasize an impact? What about silhouette? I'm sure just saying that is the simplest way, but I'm looking to streamline it. I don't like to break flow, but I want to sell the style.
All right, so the images that we're looking at here, I'm not sure what this is from, but the protagonist here is on a purple background, and then this woman shows up and slaps him, and it's a yellow background. And then the slaps are always on a different colored background. So it's visually striking. Eric Kripke, you are a person who has adapted a graphic novel series, comic books, into another form. What do you think about this? I'm going to say something like,
annoying and ice watery, which is they're different mediums. And comics, because I wrote a comic for Vertigo, and so I really got inside it. And comics, it's a medium of space, and TV and film is a medium of time. And they do not...
connect one-to-one. Yeah. And so I actually think you're risking something in your story to try to make it to keep the fidelity to the comic too high because they just don't have the same rhythms. So I would suggest don't focus on any of it. Leave it to the director and just worry about making the characters nuanced and complicated and great. Yeah.
and a tight story that keeps turning. Yeah, thinking about the boys, you're clearly in a heightened universe. And so you're looking at the pilot script for that. Like, we can see that we're in a heightened universe that feels...
adjacent, but you're not trying to emulate the specific styles of what it would look like on the page. There's none of that kind of stuff. And unlike Scott Pilgrim or Spider-Verse, where you feel the intrusion of those elements onto the form, we're not seeing that in your show. We know it's in a comic space without having the conventions of comics. Right. I mean, I think, look, I think Scott Pilgrim is one of the very few exceptions, maybe
with a lot of fidelity to the original material and it worked. I'd say much more often they don't. You know, Damon's Watchmen was so much more interesting than the movie because he went his own direction with it. Yeah. Yeah, what I would say, like, it's about finding, like, what's unique about your story. Like, The Boys, for instance, what defined a lot of the visual language that, you know, Dan Trachtenberg directed the pilot and said a lot of that language.
is our gimmick or our original little bauble was what if superheroes existed in the real world? And so you take this absurd concept, which is these magic flying people, but then how does that really work in the world we're living in? And in that tension, that's where the show lives. And so once we knew that, we knew how to make like someone-ism
comes down to earth and they seem like a god, but then they have to take a shit. So it really finding the thing that is your, for lack of a better term, whatever your concept is, letting your visuals flow from that is good because that's a, we keep saying, well, what can we do that no other show can do? And that always brings us back to presenting something that stems from our concept.
Also, this brings us right all the way back to the challenge you had going from the short film of Battle of the Sexes to a feature film. It's like the world building didn't make sense. The world fundamentally didn't fit together right with those things you were trying to put together. And in The Boys, it's a heightened place, but within the rules of The Boys, things do actually make sense. There's a consistency, there's an internal consistency behind the different elements. Right, of course. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I take a lot of pride in...
maintaining that consistency, I drive, you know, my production designer nuts with like the posters in the background. I make him do like 12 versions of because I'm like, well, that doesn't quite fit. And that character wouldn't have been in that movie at that time. And I got to get, I got really obsessive with it because it's just fun. And like, the point is, is like the rules don't have to actually be logical, but they do have to be consistent. Yeah. And,
And I think once people can do that, you can feel the internal logic of a piece. A thing that I've always wondered about with the boys is that why Huey or some other person doesn't point out, like, we must be living in a simulation. Like, there's no way that these physics could possibly make sense. Like, we have scientists, but the scientists could not possibly explain the things that are actually happening here. So this must be a simulation. Yeah.
Is that an idea that ever came up in your thinking, in your development? That Huey or some other characters are like, no, this is impossible. No, no, never did. I mean, we always said the show only has one slippery banana, which is Compound V.
And you sort of buy it because the fact that it was born out of concentration camp testing, you know, and it's like just this side of believable that you could make something like that if you had thousands of people you could torture, uh, Mangala style. Uh-huh. And...
We always say like that's the only magical thing. Yeah. You know, and so people just believe that this chemical can do this thing. Because it's a central premise. Without that central premise, the whole show doesn't exist. So people are willing to buy it because you're asking them to buy one thing versus a bunch of little small things. Right, exactly. So every time someone pitches me some James Bond-ian set piece or some super high tech, oh, he's flying in on a flying, you know, Green Goblin thing. I'm like, who invented that?
Where did that magic come from? Like, we only get one magical thing and it's this vial of blue shit. That's it. Yeah, so if aliens showed up in The Boys, it wouldn't make sense. Wouldn't make any sense because we get one magic thing.
I loved the show True Blood, but one of the frustrations I have with the show is like, I did feel like they kept adding layers onto it that didn't all feel consistent with the premise that we'd had established in the early seasons. Yeah, but a beautiful metaphor though, that show, yeah. So, so good. And we'll talk more about Blood in the bonus segment. But first, let's go to our one cool thing. So my one cool thing for people to check out this week is a video. So this was during the Olympics, the Olympics that were in Paris, right?
during those opening ceremonies along the Seine, which went on really kind of too long for my taste. But there was a moment where there's the minions do this little segment where like the minions are in the Seine and they're like in a submarine.
I love the Minions, and I was hoping that I could find just that segment, and it was actually as good as I remember, and I'm happy to report it is just as delightful as I remember. So it's two minutes of the Minions having hijinks in a submarine. I think it's absolutely delightful. So it's on YouTube, on the official Olympics little channel there. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes to two minutes of the Minions doing the Olympics. So
So I recommend that. One of my good friends that we went to film school together co-directed the last Minions movie. Oh, fantastic. Who's this? Brad Abelson. All right. But yeah, Minions. The Minions are a fantastic creation and they are so smartly done. They're just these little creatures of pure instinct and I just love them so much. Yeah. No, that's a good one. That's a good one. Eric, what do you have to share with us?
Two things pop in my head. Can I say both of them? Absolutely. One, and they might not be that obscure, so I don't know, but...
The last movie I saw that really blew me away was Strange Darling. I've recommended Strange Darling. I think it is so fantastic. I'm telling everyone to see it. I was so frustrated that more people are not seeing it or that it's not getting the award attention it should get. It's so good and brilliantly directed, but that script is so tight and it's such a perfect example of how to reveal information and when to. And I was blown away by it and I would just recommend it.
the less you know about that movie, the better. Just, if you're listening to this, go on Amazon or whatever and watch Strange Darling. And so there is blood. And so we'll say that if you cannot watch any blood, don't watch the movie. But it's just so smart. It's so, so smart. And then the second one, is it okay if I say a podcast? Because it's a podcast I've been listening to. It's fairly mainstream, but like the Lonely Island Seth Meyers podcast is,
where every week they talk about a short film that Lonely Island made during SNL. But more than that, it's a very nitty-gritty take of what it was like behind the scenes at SNL. And if you're a comedy nerd, which I am...
Like, they get so granular about how brutal it was and the chaos that led to these sketches. And anyway, I find it both fascinating and very, very funny. Absolutely. It's always great when you see like, oh, this thing that you love, they love it too, but their experience of it was so different because they actually had to make it and it was...
And they didn't know if it was going to be good while they were doing it. They were surprised too. I have a question for you actually, because I find that my, my mom always used to say cake never tastes as good when you bake it yourself. And I find that's really true. Do you find like so many other people like the,
like the boys in Gen V more than me. Because for me, it's like a painful process because all I'm thinking about is the mistakes and what I wish I could have done better. Do you find that on your work? I do, some. People love the second Charlie's Angels movie and it was such a really painful experience for me that I have a hard time experiencing the same joy they have for it. Yeah. The flip side of that is Big Fish was a largely good experience for me and I've gotten to do the Big Fish musical again and again and again and again. It's been just so much work
work in so many years of my life. Yeah. But I can also get to watch it now and actually just enjoy it as its own thing. And so I've crossed through that Rubicon of like it being painful too, appreciating that the pain is part of why I love it so much. Yeah. Yeah. No, I get that. I mean, there's certain episodes of Supernatural now that I can watch and enjoy. Yeah.
but I needed like 10 to 15 years of separation to really enjoy it. I don't think either one of us is going to go back and you watch your Tarzan or me watch my DC show. It's like, there's too much pain there. There's not a lot of joy left in there. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. Cool.
That is Script Notes for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Cialelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau.
Thank you. This was so fun.