How do you make an idea ripped from the headlines subversive? You hand it to “The Boys” producing team and their songwriter, Christopher Lennertz. Showrunner Eric Kripke was inspired by Fox News pundits and former Hallmark talent demanding to re-center the December holiday season on Christ and Christian values. So his team took the idea of “Put the Christ back in Christmas” to Lennertz, and Season 4’s “Vought on Ice” special set piece was born.
We see the performance, which features ice skaters dressed as the show’s Queen Maeve and Homelander performing triple axles during the Emmy-nominated “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas,” as an actor dressed as Jesus descends from the ceiling. It’s a spectacle even before Homelander (Antony Starr) turns it into a massacre while chasing Hughie (Jack Quaid) through the arena. And with Tony Award nominee Shoshana Bean and winners Andrew Rannells and James Monroe Iglehart lending their voices to the track, the Broadway influences are hard to miss.
Lennertz was prepared for this songwriting challenge — he grew up as a musical theater nerd, and his recent credits include Disneyland’s “Rogers: The Musical.”
“I’ve been doing tons of theater stuff lately, but all on the wholesome side. I had to figure out how to get more on the edgy side,” he says. “How do we really get into the satire that ‘The Boys’ has? ‘The Book of Mormon’ is absolutely the kind of humor we were going for.”
“The Book of Mormon” may have been the tone that Lennertz was leaning into, but the most difficult part of crafting the song was nailing the subversive satire of “The Boys.” It requires threading a comedic needle.
“The most challenging part for me is going far enough into the satire where it’s funny, but not so obvious that it’s a joke to everyone,” he says. “‘The Boys’ has things to say about politics, about religion, about sociology and all this stuff, but it hides them in double entendre and satire.”
Season 4 of “The Boys” premiered five months before the 2024 presidential election, which means the song was conceived and written almost two years before Christian nationalism became a part of Donald Trump’s most recent campaign. Lennertz and the creative team weren’t purposefully attempting to foreshadow anything, but it’s also not the first time the show has made commentary on current events months in advance.
“The song was written before we ever thought that Trump would be elected again. We should know better, because this is the way societies work when we have megalomaniacs with tons of money and campaign contributions by the wealthiest people in the world,” Lennertz says. “Obviously, people are going to push agendas. One of the things that we do on ‘The Boys’ is say, ‘We’re not going to let them. We’re not going to let that go unmentioned.’”
Lennertz may not have specifically been targeting Trump with the song, but he doesn’t shy away from the show’s mission to stand up to bullies, whether it’s with a smart script or one of his songs.
“One of the things we try to do with the music in the show is to always be pushing against that. We’re trying to make sure that we comment on it, because that’s art. That’s what we do as creators to express ourselves. ‘The Boys’ does it in a raunchier, and I also think a more clever, way than most.”
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