The Boys Caused Amazon to Start a Standards and Practices Department

For most media companies, Standards & Practices is a fancy word for “the people in the company that make sure we don’t do anything illegal or put anything on the air that is too much.” The Walt Disney Company for instance has a notorious “S&P” to make sure content on certain channels is family appropriate, just ask Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch who recently shared a montage of complaints he got from S&P. Amazon Prime Video apparently didn’t get the memo and didn’t even have a Standards & Practices department for a few years, then they started producing The Boys.

“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,” The Boys creator Eric Kripke told TV Line. “It was 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 honor that I helped start their Standards department.” Kripke went on to talk about some things that they wanted to do in the recent “Herogasm” episode, and how they had a problem with S&P in getting it done, specifically with The Deep’s big scene with an octopus

“The discussion of that scene and how we pulled off that scene actually triggered a lot of alarm bells at a lot of different levels at Amazon because you’re not supposed to show people f-king animals, and I get it,” Kripke added. “But 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?”

Six episodes of The Boys’ season three are now available with the final two episodes arriving over the next two weeks. As of this writing the new season of the show has managed to hold on to its 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, complete with a “Certified Fresh” distinction, tying it with season two as the highest rated batch of episodes for the show. Even with the critical acclaim that has followed the show, many viewers have been review-bombing the show not only for its content but because the series continues to release episodes weekly.