The Boys Season 1 review

First off, there’s a lot about “The Boys” that’s familiar, most of it purposefully so. When first introduced, the show’s superheroes are doing everything you’d expect: They’re saving kids, stopping bank robberies, and taking selfies with fervent fans. But once out of the public eye, these heroes are anything but heroic. They frequent private clubs where cell-phone bans give them the freedom to act however they want, which involves an incredible-shrinking-man sizing-down and long-jumping into a woman’s vagina, and skybound supers having very public sex among the rafters, as only they can.

Adapted by Eric Kripke from the Wildstorm-then-Dynamite comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, The Boys is set in a world in which the "super-abled" are a normal part of everyday life. There are hundreds of individuals with powers and the most gifted of their lot are under contract to Vought Industries, a massive conglomerate that manages marketing and deployment with an emphasis on the commodification of altruism. Naturally, this is a world in which with great power comes great abuse of power, and one in which the easy availability of superheroes has left much of the general populace tentative, spineless and complacent hero-worshippers and consumers. The bleakness of your own worldview will probably determine how close this feels to reality.

But where the writing staff really excels is in the world-building. They’ve kept large chunks of the comic book story intact while also stripping away a bit of the X-Treme Edginess—I like Garth Ennis a lot, but Garth Ennis is occasionally too Garth Ennis for his own good—and setting it firmly in a setting that’s both comic-book elevated and so perfectly 2019. Superheroes argue not about the number of lives saved, but their cut of the merch and box office sales raked in from the Vought Cinematic Universe. ESPN runs 24/7 coverage of a race between speedsters. SEO experts and video editors cut together image-boosting clip shows of The Seven interacting with the common folk. (Possibly my favorite joke in the entire show is the fact newcomer Starlight’s segment is placeholder text that just says “Starlight relating to people.”)And with that comes a really dark, unique relatability to the material that’s completely different than any on-screen comic book series out there. Though we don’t live in a world of actual superpowers, we do live in one filled with supremely shitty people in extraordinary positions of power and wealth. Tune into literally any news outlet of your choice—or just log on to Twitter dot com—and you’re bombarded with the latest government figure or Hollywood elite who was caught and/or just outright said the depths of their sheer shittiness. It makes you long for the days when a celebrity’s name trending meant they were just dead, not a sexual deviant. The Boys, similar to the comic series, leans hard into this idea: What if the rich, powerful fraudsters and public masturbators of the world were actually sitting in the position of the gods? It’s the darkest material on the show, but the story approaches it unflinchingly. There’s a real stomach-churning familiarity to a high-ranking member of The Seven dropping his pants in front of Starlight and asking how badly she wants to be a part of a superhero team. But even the worst parts come with a sense of wish fulfillment; as awful as it is to see and recognize a world run by all-powerful assholes, it’s thrilling when you realize The Boys is really about how ordinary people can fight back.

And within this tantalizing idea of our superhero fantasies meeting the hellish reality of human nature, there of course has to be a Superman. In the world of "The Boys," that's the almighty Homelander, the most powerful, untouchable, and therefore most dangerous of them all. With his blonde hair neatly coiffed in a certain way, speaking shallowly about his impenetrable power while wearing the American flag as a cape, he’s like a vision of Trump that's jumped out of a Ben Garrison political cartoon, a timely context that this series thankfully only winks at. Homelander is depicted with an effectively creepy fascistic nature by Antony Starr, who makes an eerie habit out of Homelander stating “You’re the real heroes” to any group that applauds his latest act, and then following it up with a condescending, venomous sneer. It’s wonderfully grotesque, like in an episode when Homelander hovers over a massive religious festival crowd in a Christ-like position, paralleling a speech about the supremacy of America with his own godlike spectacle. On the superhero side, I liked Banshee veteran Starr, playing what I'm choosing to interpret as a variation on Armie Hammer's near parody of All-American handsomeness; Crawford, taking on an extreme of CW-friendly cockiness; and McElligott, eagerly breaking from her frequent prim-and-proper period roles.

Moriarty is the pilot's most likable element, and so it's unsettling how much time is spent building up to or around Annie's debasement and how outrageous the pilot wants you to think those moments are. Her centrality is a good way to offset how, if it just focused on Hughie, The Boys would be another of those stories about emasculated men finding their mojo through violence, a commentary on vigilantism that can become gleefully reactionary if you get off on the extremes in a way that I often think Mark Millar (Wanted, Kick-Ass) does. Of course, when they're fully assembled in the comic, the titular organization push the story more in that direction, and the character of Female provides an uncomfortable combination of stereotype and stereotype-bashing that has to be handled nearly perfectly to work.

I'll have to check in again on The Boys after a few more episodes to get a sense of whether or not the encroaching cynicism topples what I find initially promising here.