The advertising business has always understood that the best way to sell something is to show people where it came from — the factory floor, the family recipe, the founding partners shaking hands in a photograph that looks older than it probably is. Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television are now applying this principle to one of streaming's more caustic franchises.

A trailer released this week offers a first look at "Vought Rising," a prequel to "The Boys," the Prime Video series that has spent several seasons suggesting that if superheroes existed, they would almost certainly be managed by a marketing department. The new show, set in 1952, traces the origins of the fictional Vought corporation and its early experiments with Compound V, the substance that creates superpowered beings and, presumably, superpowered intellectual property.

Jensen Ackles returns as Soldier Boy, the jingoistic hero who proved popular enough in the second season to warrant his own backstory, alongside Aya Cash as Stormfront. Both actors are also serving as producers, a credit that has become as common in prestige television as craft services. The cast includes Will Hochman, Mason Dye and Elizabeth Posey as period-appropriate heroes with names like Torpedo, Bombsight and Private Angel (what, you were expecting subtlety from this franchise?).

Eric Kripke, who created "The Boys," told The Hollywood Reporter that the new series would feature "a very gritty version of the '50s," including heroin dens and gay bars — the sort of underbelly that postwar American advertising worked very hard to paper over with images of chrome appliances and contented housewives.

"It's really when America defined what the next 100 years were going to look like," Mr. Kripke said. "You see this reasonably new invention called television, with this new notion of advertising right into people's homes."

He might have added that the people doing the advertising have been refining their techniques ever since.

Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "'Vought Rising' Trailer Gives a First Look at 'The Boys' Spin-Off"