The Boys Draws Inspiration from Cecily Strong’s SNL Sketch for Starlight’s Storyline

“We just wanted to normalize it a little bit,” says showrunner Eric Kripke.

Cecily Strong’s Goober the Clown bit on Saturday Night Live’s 47th season continues to speak volumes three years later.

According to The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke, the sketch was a big inspiration for the Starlight/Annie January reveal on season 4’s “Wisdom of the Ages.” In the episode, which dropped on Prime Video this week, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) makes another below-the-belt attempt to smear Annie’s name. With the backing of Vought, she sets up an hours-long livestream event that culminated with revealing Annie’s medical records and outing her abortion publicly.

The Boys Season 4 Trailer

After severely beating the you-know-what out of Firecracker for pulling such a cheap and invasive stunt, Annie has a conversation with Hughie (Jack Quaid) about how she agonized over the decision, how they weren’t ready for a kid, and how she now has to relive the moment any time anyone brings it up to her. “It’s no one business but yours,” Hughie tells her.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade was happening in real time as we were writing, so it was definitely on everybody’s mind,” Kripke tells Entertainment Weekly. “But another inspiration for us was Cecily Strong.”

Strong appeared on “Weekend Update” on SNL  season 47 as Goober the Clown as a way to talk about her own abortion while doing “fun clown stuff” to make the conversation “more palatable.”

“Who’s Cecily? I’m Goober!” she says in the sketch. “I wish I didn’t have to do this because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business, but that’s all some people in this country want to discuss all the time, even though clown abortion was legalized in Clown v. Wade in 1973.”

“It really moved me,” Kripke recalls of watching that sketch. “What I think we were really trying to get across [on The Boys] is how common it is, and yet so few women can talk about it. So we were like, ‘Let’s just throw it out there and deal with it.'”

The writers’ room tried to handle the storyline for Annie as realistically as possible — despite being set in the over-the-top world of supes. “We spoke to a lot of women who had abortions, but the main thing we wanted to get across was it’s not a particularly massive, overdramatic thing. It’s a thing that thousands and thousands and thousands of women go through,” Kripke continues. “We just wanted to normalize it a little bit. If in a big genre show you can talk about it and not have it be the most earth-shattering, apocalyptic moment, but it’s a difficult moment that a woman went through and then continued to live her life, we thought there was value in that perspective, which is a perspective that’s almost never in TV or movies.”

Related Posts

Outer Banks star Chase Stokes almost landed the role of Steve Harrington in Stranger Things—until two shocking twists derailed his chance

Outer Banks star Chase Stokes admits his audition for Stranger Things was an absolute disaster. The 30-year-old actor reveals he was almost cast as Steve Harrington from the hit Netflix…

Season 4 of The Lincoln Lawyer will be like a ticking time b0mb. You know what I mean?

Dailyn Rodriguez said everyone was “flabbergasted” by the end, and I was too.Spoilers for The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3 are ahead! If you are not caught up, you can…

Fans of hit Netflix show convinced stunt double was used for a hug after feud rumours

Netflix viewers are baffled after seemingly spotting that a stunt double was used for a ‘cuddle’ scene after rumours of a feud between two actors.On Thursday, the latest…

Hearing the Outer Banks cast’s salaries it’s clear Madelyn Cline isn’t the BEST paid!

Netflix’s “Outer Banks” is rapidly becoming one of the most beloved teen drama shows globally, and naturally, viewers are curious about how much of that success is…

Chase Stokes & Rudy Pankow’s biggest fear revealed in Outer Banks Season 4

Weeks after Outer Banks season 4 part 1 was released, Netflix renewed the series for a fifth and final batch of episodes. The adventure drama follows John B Routledge…

Netflix fans are furious as only three blockbuster episodes were uploaded: “I thought I was losing my mind!”

Netflix fans were left fuming after three episodes of a hit show were uploaded to the streaming giant without sound.The gaffe from the streamer confused viewers, who took…