The Boys: Season 1

All y'all know by know that comics and superheroes are very much not my shit, and that my interest in the genre is that of any vanilla movie-goer, any garden-variety thirtysomething white guy. Broadly speaking, I neither love nor hate the annual onslaught of new content, and I pick and choose my way through these various cinematic universes with specific, limited interest.

The Boys, then, did not seem like it was going to be for me. The advertising, the marketing - I mean, look at that poster art. Yuck! And yet here I sit after devouring eight episodes in less than a week, very excited for the second season.

The show's based on a comic book from 2008 or so, which kinda tracks; that's about the latest possible year someone could have called their creation "The Boys" without inducing all kinds of groans and winces. Unfortunate name aside, the "Boys" in question aren't superheroes. Rather, they're members of a covert operation tracking, limiting, and in some cases even murdering superheroes. I guess they're literal antiheroes! (Yeah, this whole thing just plays so much better ten years ago, I'm sorry.)

Turns out, the superheroes in the world of The Boys are exactly what uber-powerful people would end up being, which is to say a bunch of corrupt and egotistical assholes, some of them downright evil. The show's most fascinating character is Homelander, a Superman-Captain America hybrid who wears stars and stripes on his cape, but also, you know, shoots down planes full of innocent people (twice!) for nefarious reasons. So this ragtag crew, the titular Boys, largely motivated by individual desires for personal vengeance, are attempting to expose if not destroy them. In some ways, it's a nice little story about the little guys fighting back - and that's something that honestly plays better in 2019 than in 2008.

I appreciated how patiently this show builds the world in which it takes place. We're still meeting major characters halfway through the season and when it draws to a conclusion, it feels like it's all just getting started. I know the whole "the first season is really just an extended pilot" model of TV storytelling can be stale and irritating, but it's not like the season was all exposition, at all.

I dunno, give it a try!