The Boys season 2 gets September premiere, shifts to weekly schedule

Let's hear it for The Boys... which finally has some big news to announce, including the long-awaited season 2 premiere date on Amazon Prime Video.

Back in March, the cast and crew — including Karl Urban, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, and Jack Quaid — would've assembled to unveil a few things at PaleyFest in Los Angeles, but certain world events transpired and the panel was canceled. Now, Amazon is ready to reveal that season 2 will premiere Sept. 4 in a slightly different format.

While all eight episodes of season 1 launched at once in July 2019, season 2 will only drop the first three episodes on Sept. 4 before launching into a weekly schedule with new episodes dropping every Friday through Oct. 9. Perhaps this change is due to the show's popularity, which only really grew in the weeks following its release. It ended up becoming one of the most successful launches for an Amazon Original Series.

The news comes out of a virtual panel with showrunner Eric Kripke (Supernatural) and his cast. Patton Oswalt, who has a secret role in season 2, moderated the event, which included footage of the premiere episode's opening moments. Watch the full panel below and skip to the 47:35 mark to watch the first three minutes of the new season.

Season 2 finds the Boys — Hughie (Quaid), Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capon), and Kimiko/the Female (Karen Fukuhara) — on the run from the law with Billy (Urban) nowhere to be found. He's been occupied by the surprise revelation that his wife isn't dead after all and she's been in hiding with her son, conceived when Homelander (Starr) assaulted her. Speaking of the Supes in the Seven, Starlight (Moriarty) now has to navigate her place on the team after facing off against A Train (Jessie T. Usher). With the threat of new supervillains, which were caused when Homelander gave the Compound V to international terrorists, Vought seeks to capitalize on the nation's growing paranoia.

Homelander is also now looking to take full control of the Seven, but a new Supe on the block, the social media-savvy, plasma-powered Stormfront (Aya Cash), complicates that goal.

Ahead of the panel, Amazon released a clip of Stormfront surprising Homelander and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) with the news that she's come to replace the deceased Translucent as the latest member of the Seven. And she livestreams the whole encounter to all her followers so Homelander can't take out his rage.

“She’s the grenade that gets thrown into Homelander’s world and the world of the Seven,” Starr previously told EW on set. "She really causes me so many problems."

"We cannot WAIT to show you season 2. It’s crazier, stranger, more intense, more emotional," Kripke said in a statement. "In fact, it’s too much — so the Surgeon General has insisted we air the first three episodes on September 4, then air the remaining five episodes weekly after that. We wanted to give you time to freak out, digest, discuss, come down from the high, before we give you another dose. We only have your well-being in mind. Hope you love the season as much as we do." (Editor's note: No, the Surgeon General did not insist that."

Kripke tweeted in May that filming on The Boys had already wrapped and he was "finishing season 2 remotely," despite the coronavirus halting most major productions. "Still some VFX & sound to do, but we're SO CLOSE!" he teased at the time.

On June 15, Starr gave fans another clue about the premiere date in a post on Instagram, accompanied by a few photos from season 1. "Guess what... season two comes out soon," he wrote.

Other newbies this season include Timeless‘ Claudia Doumit as wunderkind congresswoman Victoria Neuman, and another Timeless vet, Goran Visnjic, as mysterious church leader Alistair Adana.

Kripke also teased a bigger role for Giancarlo Esposito's Mr. Edgar in season 2, an episode featuring Billy's (Urban) dog Terror, a movie-within-a-show that the Seven are filming, a different relationship between Billy and Hughie (Quaid) following that big reveal in the last finale, and continuing threads set up in season 1.

"We have this real quirk of the show that it keeps reflecting reality," Kripke said at the end of season 1. "Now people are scared of people coming over the border and people are feeling like we might have to go to war, and suddenly the world is so much more of an intense place than it used to be — and so is our season 2."

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