Once a pretty good series, Amazon’s The Boys has descended into shock humor and leftist political commentary.
I’m a pretty big Garth Ennis fan.
I was first introduced to his work through my love of the Punisher. Ennis’s Punisher Max run is by far my favorite depiction of the gun-toting vigilante, and his adaptation brings a gritty realism to Frank Castle and his one-man war on crime that no other writer has been able to pull off (though Jason Aaron did an okay job with his follow-up Punisher Max run).
Garth’s Punisher run convinced me to check out some of his other work, like Preacher and The Boys. Holy shit, this guy’s stuff was great. It was aggressive, dark, gritty, and profane. These were comics for adults telling adult stories, not that goofy Golden Age stuff Stan Lee was slinging (with all due respect to the Legend).
Ennis’s writing comes on very strong, the guy doesn’t hold anything back in his stories. There’s sex, blood, death, and destruction, sometimes gratuitously. This abrasiveness makes his work kind of hard for some people to enjoy, and I suppose I understand why a lot of people don’t care for his stuff. Garth Ennis is definitely hard to digest, especially in a world where superheroes are depicted as quirky one-liner-spouting goofballs.
Ennis has been pretty open about his disdain for superheroes, and he’s said many times that he thinks superheroes have ruined comic books by shifting the focus away from storytelling. Is he right? I don’t know, most of the comics I own are about superheroes, and while I think a lot of the modern comic book writers are terrible there’s definitely a lot of entertaining stories out there about supes. I guess I see his point though, in the same way I saw Scorsese’s point about superhero movies ruining cinema despite the fact that I enjoyed most of the MCU up to Avengers: End Game. There’s less focus on telling a good story and more focus on action, special effects, and admittedly unfunny jokes. Scorsese isn’t wrong, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still turn our brains off sometimes and enjoy these movies.
Anyway, Ennis’s disdain for superheroes culminated in his series The Boys, a comic series about a world where superheroes exist, but aren’t really as noble as they appear to the public.
The Boys serves as an attempt to place superheroes into a realistic world, where the supes are manufactured and managed by a large company known as Vought American. To the public, the heroes are noble saviors who fight for justice and protect the world. However, behind closed doors most of them are total degenerates. Murder, rape, pedophilia, things like that. One supe is described as raping a young boy so hard that the boy left blood behind on a seat. Another hero is said to have raped and killed a baby. While these crimes obviously aren’t depicted, it’s clear that Ennis wants the reader to really hate superheroes, as throughout the entire comic every supe (save for a small group of supes who are special needs) is depicted as a degenerate lunatic. This is why people are iffy about Ennis’s stuff. He doesn’t shy away from sensitive topics, and when he wants you to hate a bad guy he goes all-out to show you why you should hate them. I like this, but it’s definitely not for everyone.
In Ennis’s world of deranged superheroes, the CIA has a team of operatives that specialize in keeping the heroes somewhat in check. Who watches the watchmen? The Boys do, and they stomp the everloving shit out of them.
The Boys is a team of five individuals appointed by the CIA to monitor, gather intel on, and even sometimes kill heroes who get too out of line. The team is led by ex-British Royal Marine and Falklands War veteran Billy Butcher. Other team members include Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, The Female, and Hughie. The group are given injections of Compound V, a chemical that gives them the super strength and durablity required to handle fighting supes. Each member has an axe to grind with the supes, particularly Butcher. I’m not going to give an entire synopsis of the series, you’ll have to read it for yourself. The comic is great, and I recommend it highly.
When Amazon announced that they’d be doing a live action adaptation of the series in 2019, I was excited. Seth Rogen was slated to direct, which would have set off alarm bells if not for the fact that he had already adapted Ennis’s other series, Preacher. While Seth’s adaptation of Preacher deviated a little from the comics, it still wasn’t bad (I’ll be doing a review on this soon).
The first season of The Boys wasn’t bad. Sure, it strayed a little bit from the comics, but considering how graphic the source material was I hadn’t expected it to be too faithful. I was a little disappointed that they made Hughie American, but I was also happy that Simon Pegg still made an appearance as Hughie’s dad (in the comics Hughie’s character was modeled on Pegg). I didn’t mind the race changes of A-Train or The Deep, nor the gender swaps of Stillwell and Mallory. I was also intrigued at the idea that The Boys wouldn’t be getting Compound V injections like they had in the comics, and thus would be relatively normal people going up against superhumans.
The casting was pretty good as well. Most of the actors did a pretty good job of portraying their characters, but Anthony Starr and Karl Urban really stood out. Starr was perfect as Homelander, and I think he captured the dual nature of the series’ primary antagonist quite well. Urban was a little small for Billy Butcher, and I wasn’t really a fan of the beard, but he made up for it with his performance, which was about as spot-on as you could get for the character. There was also a fair amount of blood, gore, and depravity, which was a necessity for this series. Like I said, the comics were pretty graphic, so I wasn’t expecting a TV adaptation to be anywhere near as explicit. All things considered, the first season of The Boys did pretty good with capturing the spirit of its source material while still working within the obvious restrictions that come with doing a TV show.
The Amazon series also added a lot of social commentary, which the comics didn’t really do. While I wasn’t terribly fond of it, it didn’t feel too shoehorned and was relatively unbiased, making fun of extremists and idiots on both sides of the political spectrum. I was actually surprised at how balanced it was, given that Seth Rogen is a staunch liberal, and the world was still reeling from a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Of course there was plenty of left-leaning commentary, as seems to be the case with pretty much anything made after 2015. But the series also made fun of the virtue signallers and ivory tower liberals who pretended to care about “disenfranchised” groups without actually understanding anything about those groups. If I have to suffer through social commentary, I’d at least like it to be bipartisan.
Then the second season came out. This time, the show attempted to capitalize on its reputation for being gritty and graphic. They doubled down on the gory deaths and gross-out humor. They also decided to go a little more to the left with the commentary, though they still didn’t shy away from making fun of the out of touch wealthy liberals and corporate panderers. Aya Cash was brought on as Stormfront, a supe created by the Nazis during World War 2. I didn’t mind the gender swap here, especially since Aya is nice to look at.
The series also made some questionable choices, like giving The Female a name and having her talk sometimes. It was clear that the series was going to veer away from the comics and be its own thing, which didn’t bother me too much because Preacher did the same thing and still turned out alright. It was a step down from the first season, but the second season was still watchable.
The third season is where it became abundantly clear that Seth and Amazon no longer gave two fucks about the source material. Liberal politics were being shoehorned in at every possible turn, Homelander was suddenly turned into an analogue for Trump, A-Train was given a “White people are evil” redemption arc, and Jensen Ackles, aka Dean Winchester, was cast as Soldier Boy, a racist superhero from the 40s. It was a real shit show.
I had hope for the third season. Jensen is a good actor, and I was excited to see what he’d bring to The Boys. And, to his credit, he played the role of Soldier Boy well. In fact, he played it so well that people actually liked the character. Ackles’s performance was one of the few high points of the third season, but it wasn’t enough to salvage the series.
But because I’m an idiot who subscribes to the sunken cost fallacy, I still watched the fourth season. I thought the liberal politics was bad in the last season, but evidently Seth Rogen took that as a personal challenge and tripled down on the leftist commentary. At this point Homelander was basically just a stand-in for Trump, and pretty much everything he said or did was meant to be a reference to something Trump said or did. Another character, Firecracker, was introduced as a conservative conspiracy theory-spouting talk show host. Because we needed an Alex Jones parody too, I guess. Just like with Soldier Boy, this backfired and created another character that fans liked against the showrunners’ wishes. It also didn’t help that she gave off MILF vibes, and it definitely didn’t help when they had her breastfeed Homelander.
The show also has began leaning too hard into the shock humor. Yes, I know the source material did the same thing. The thing is though, the source material also had a good story with good characters, and the shock stuff was used to illustrate how fucked up the characters were. While it was excessive, it at least had a point to it. Most of the shock humor on the show doesn’t really drive the plot in any way. The TV show has abandoned any semblance of a good story in favor of political commentary and one-dimensional characters that are just stand-ins for whatever viewpoint the showrunners are trying to cram down our throats.
I also want to talk about how the show makes a joke out of men being sexually assaulted and raped. In one scene, Hughie is sexually assaulted by Ashley, who sticks her hand down her pants and wipes her “juices” on Hughie’s face. This is played for laughs. In another scene, Hughie and Starlight have sex. Except, we find out that it’s not actually Starlight, but a shapeshifter who took her form, i.e. rape by deception. Rather than be sympathetic to Hughie, Starlight freaks out and dumps him.
As someone who’s been sexually assaulted by women on more than one occasion, the double standard society seems to have regarding female-on-male sexual assault pisses me off. I’m not going to sit here and claim that I was traumatized and have PTSD from it, but I can say that any guy who says they wouldn’t mind being sexually assaulted by a woman has never actually had it happen to them. I can say from experience that having some uggo stick her hand down her pants and forcibly wipe her pussy juice on your face isn’t pleasant, in fact it’s very violating and disgusting. But according to Eric Kripke, the show’s lead writer, it’s “funny as hell”. I’d probably find being sexual assaulted funny too if I looked like a literal pimple:
The hypocrisy of these people is what pisses me off the most. Imagine if the roles were reversed, and it was Starlight getting semen smeared on her face. Would Kripke find that funny? Fuck no, that shit wouldn’t have even made it to air. If a shapeshifter had impersonated Hughie and had sex with Starlight, and Hughie got mad at Starlight, you can bet your sweet ass this show would be cancelled for victim shaming, and hypocrites like Seth Rogen and Eric Kripke would be leading the charge.
The tastelessness of how Hughie’s sexual assault and rape were treated are testament to the show’s decline. The Boys has deviated too much from the source material to a point where the only thing they can really do is make fun of Trump supporters and cram as much pointless gore and shock humor as possible into every episode. The frame work for a decent adaptation was all there, and they blew it. Superhero movies were at their peak when this series started airing, it was the perfect time for something that turned the genre on its head. You didn’t need to completely change the story from the comics, all you had to do was tone it down a bit and maybe change or add some new characters to appeal to current audiences. But this opportunity was squandered on cheap shock and in-your-face political commentary.
The fifth season is set to be the final one, and my dumb ass will still watch it because I already sunk time into the other four seasons and feel at least somewhat obligated to know how this mess ends. Given how progressively worse the series has gotten over the last two seasons, I can only imagine what Rogen and Kripke have in store for the fifth and final season. I’ve already seen stills of “Freedom Camps”, so it’s not looking good.
Overall, this series had promise, but it lost its way at season 3. The Boys is a mess of shock humor, gross-out moments, and liberal politics that drag the show down and make an embarrassment out of an otherwise talented cast. You’re better off sticking to the comics on this one.
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