“You wait your whole career for everything to come together the way that this one has, and a lot of it is luck,” admitted The Boys showrunner Erik Kripke of the acclaim achieved by the Amazon Prime Video series based on Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s hardcore, satirical, political and extremely poignant comic series. “The right subject matter, that has a lot of different layers and depth to it, [and] that happens to be talking about the exact second we’re living in.”

Riding high and with its third season deep in production, The Boys, executive produced by Kripke, Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, is nominated for Outstanding Drama Series at the upcoming Emmys, as well as in several more categories including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for Rebecca Sonnenshine’s work on the Season 2 finale.

Kripke and fellow EP Sonnenshine joined Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event to talk about the show and its relationship to the fractured and often celebrity-fueled America of 2021.

“Why would you want to run your country like a corporation?” asks The Crossing veteran Sonnenshine about what is one of the main storylines of our times, and The Boys itself via the powerful Vought International pulling all the superpowered strings. “Corporations are not to be trusted, and somehow the mythology of American success has made corporations this shiny example.”

From the tentacles of corporate power to political backlash, a speedboat-punctured whale, rising populism, and let’s be honest a repurposed member of the Nazi elite vying quite successfully to become America’s super sweetheart, the September 4, 2020-launching second season of The Boys and its cast featuring Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr and Erin Moriarty struck a chord in a nation that felt like it was spinning out of control in real life.

Which was not altogether accidental, even if slightly out of sight, Kripke said.

“There’s the glacier that peeks out over the water, and that is the superhero show, and if that’s all people want to watch, they can enjoy it,” he said of the Toronto-filmed series and the war it depicts between the despicable Homelander-fronted The Seven and the rogue Boys. “But, we spend an incredible amount of time building that glacier under the water, both in terms of the character, the thematics, the satirical resonance to what’s going on today, the criticism of media and corporations, as Rebecca so rightfully said. So it’s just very gratifying that people are seeing beyond the dick jokes into all the stuff that we’re really putting into the show.”

With the third season heading towards liftoff and a spinoff also in the works, it looks as though the metaphorical glacier under the water is rising.

Check back Monday for the panel video.