When the live-action adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys finally made it to television, it was a smash success. It hit harder than Homelander, and the second season only got bigger. Sony and Prime Video couldn’t produce a third season fast enough. They needed something to tide audiences over, something… diabolical.
This week Prime Video will drop all 8 episodes of The Boys Presents: Diabolical, an animated anthology of stories set in – or at least spinning out of – the universe of The Boys. Featuring an amazing line-up of talent both as writers and voice actors, it promises to be more awesome than diabolical.
Recently, Fanboy Planet was invited to a virtual roundtable with writer and executive producer Simon Racioppa (Invincible) to talk about this first season – and hopes for a second. Also on hand were talent from Down and Nerdy, Temple of Geek, That Hashtag Show, and the Man Cave Chronicles Podcast. Together we teased out secrets behind The Boys Presents: Diabolical – starting with what the plan had been in the first place.
“It started with Evan Goldberg (executive producer of The Boys),” Racioppa told us. “I’ve worked with him on Invincible and I’ve known him for a while. He came to me and said, ‘hey, man, we’re thinking about doing this cool spin-off of The Boys. Like an anthology series with all these different creators and writers coming in and participating.’
“I was like, ‘that sounds amazing. Yeah, I’d love to do that with you.’ And then we just started spit balling a list of people whose work we really like, people we respected, people we wanted to work with, who we’d heard were fans of the show, who really liked The Boys. We started reaching out. And you know, it helps when Seth Rogen can make those calls for you and people want to work with these guys. It was not hard to get the list together, and these people were like, ‘yeah, I want to work with you!’ There were some people who said ‘I’d love to do it. I just can’t do it right now because I’m shooting a movie.’ So those people we’ll save for a potential hopeful season 2.”
At that point, Racioppa held up crossed fingers. A few times he had to remind us that there hasn’t been talk about a second season… yet. With the talent involved – and more talent that wants to be, it’s hard to think Prime Video won’t want more. Clearly, Racioppa thinks more stories need to be told, and be given more room to breathe.
“We could have made (the 8 episodes) longer. The whole (initial) idea was to make a series we could make quickly, and have it come out before Season 3 of The Boys. We wanted to give the fans something to watch and get them excited about the mothership show, but still make something that was creatively fulfilling and interesting and new. Not just like a hold-me-over, but its own thing. To do that on our schedule, it would have to be shorts. We initially wanted to do 10 of them. As we started getting into them we were like, no way, there’s no way we can do 10 of them in time, so we had to cut it down to 8. Honestly, I’m not sure we could have added minutes to that and still got it done on schedule. I wish. But maybe Season 2! It would be nice to do some longer ones for Season 2.”
“There isn’t actual talk of season 2, but if it happens, I would love to blow the doors open even more. I’d love to have the time to do stop-motion animation. I would love to do some live-action episodes. To me, Diabolical is a creative grab bag where we’re telling you different stories that you haven’t seen before with angles and points of view that you haven’t seen before.”
So the question was – who decided it would vary so much in styles?
“That was probably a Day 2 conversation on the show,” he answered. “Initially it was do we do it all one style, so it’s a show like The Simpsons or Invincible, or do we do different styles for every episode, which is much more difficult, especially on our schedule? Instead of getting to design something once, you have to design it eight times. Instead of hiring one composer, you hire eight composers.”
“It’s even more work than that because you have to source the right person, you have to find them. For every composer you hire, you’ve probably looked at six or seven. So times that by eight, you’re looking at 40 or 50 people to find those eight.”
“We knew it was going to be a tremendous amount of extra work, but as we started talking about the scripts and the ideas, it didn’t seem like there was any other way to do it properly. When you’re having scripts and stories coming in from Justin Roiland and from Andy Samberg, and the Glazers, and Awkwafina, there was no single animation style that would execute on all those ideas as well as we wanted to do. It would have meant changing them all, watering them down, and not letting them be as true to those stories and those creators as possible. It was a very difficult decision, but it was a very early decision that we made.”
Of course, now that means the sky’s the limit, right?
“To me the format of what those episodes are in whether it’s animation, stop-motion animation, CG animation, theater, puppet shows, live-action, is almost immaterial and should only be picked in terms of what serves the script or the idea the best. The first season we decided to make it all animated; we were in the middle of the pandemic and had to make it quickly. The second season I’d love to blow the doors open – maybe even do that puppet episode. I’d love to do that. Let’s give people something they haven’t seen before, something all new and something different from Season 1. That’s what I’m hoping for.”
Has anyone thought of the money to be made on Homelander puppets? But marketing really isn’t on Racioppa’s mind. It’s truly about the storytelling, and the excitement of seeing these stories come to life onscreen.
“That’s the best part of the job,” he said with a grin. “Someone says it’s like screenwriters, you get to walk through your own imagination. You get to see it made. If it’s live action you get to see sets built, if it’s animation you get to see people interpret it and bring it to life. It’s like Christmas Day. It’s amazing. When that first footage comes in and you get to unwrap it and watch it, it’s an incredible feeling. It’s the same with themes. Hearing a composer’s first pass. Seeing character design. Again, we had such an incredible team – everybody’s bringing their A game. So much talent that every time I got to review material for any of the episodes, it was an absolute treat. “
Would it be possible for the new characters created for Diabolical to show up in the regular series, especially as producer Eric Kripke did once say some of these episodes are canon?
“It depends on how far you want to push it,” Racioppa said. “I would love to see John and Sun-Hee. Because I feel like that’s a story, that’s an episode, that really could exist in the mothership. It could just be a story that we don’t see in the mothership; it happened in the margins of the main show. I’d love to see that. It would be incredible to see them on the main show. And some of Justin’s characters would definitely be interesting. But I leave that to Eric decide if he wants to bring any of the characters from Diabolical into the main show. We stole some of his so it’s only fair that he steals some of ours back.”
As for the issue of what’s canon and what’s not – always a hot button for fans – Racioppa admitted that’s a good question.
“It’s Eric’s show. He made the mothership. He created it based off of Garth (Ennis’) books. He gets to decide what’s canon and isn’t. To me, they’re all uniquely situated in their own little dimensions. I treat all of them as eight separate short films, kind of standalone. I think it’s Eric that’s going to have to answer that. Whether he will on Twitter, or whether he’ll leave it for fans to decide, I think some are more obviously difficult to be canon. You’re probably not going to see a guy with a speaker for a head on the main series. But maybe. Eric does crazy stuff. You’re going to have to ask him after we air which are canon and which are not.”
One episode likely to be considered canon is one Racioppa wrote himself, “One Plus One Equals Two,” focusing on Homelander’s early days as a public hero. But though both Homelander and The Deep appear in episodes, voiced by Antony Starr and Chace Crawford, the short “I’m Your Pusher,” written by Garth Ennis, stars the comic book versions of Butcher and Hughie, voiced instead by Jason Isaacs and Simon Pegg. For the most part, the anthology features new and original characters. Racioppa confirmed that they hadn’t intended that one way or another.
“It was just that those were the way the stories came to us,” he said. “When we reached out to all our creators like Aisha Tyler, Justin Roiland, Andy Samberg, they pitched us the ideas for the show. For the episode they wanted to do, the short films they were making. That’s just the way it happened. We didn’t push them to have more characters or not. There were areas where we thought it made sense. Like, oh, The Deep could be involved in this. So we helped out. There wasn’t a push to be more from the mothership or less from the mothership. It just kind of worked out that way.”
And when it came to Pegg finally playing the character modeled on him by Ennis and Robertson? It was a no-brainer. By the time the live-action series came to fruition, Pegg had aged out of the role.
“They brought him into the show as Hughie Campbell’s dad. But for this, we could say, ‘Simon, hey, do you want to play Wee Hughie like he is in the books?’ And he was like, ‘YES! Absolutely, I want to do that.’”
Recording Pegg took a little extra effort during the pandemic, but Racioppa thought it was worth it.
“We sent a team out to record at his house, so super safe and everything like that,” he told us. “They assembled the recording equipment, then they’d leave, and he comes in. We had a camera feed with him in England, and he was just delightful and amazing. He knew the role inside and out. We didn’t have to tell him anything. He loved it. We loved it. I’d do it again in a second.”
Like Racioppa, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that he’ll do it again in a second season.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical will stream on Prime Video starting March 4.
