By Joe Langabeer
The Boys is currently in its final season on Amazon Prime. It is based on the Garth Ennis comic books of the same name, about a group of misfits known as ‘The Boys’, who are hellbent on stopping a superhero league, ‘The Seven’, and its maniacal leader, Homelander. I enjoyed the comic books when I was a teenager, but the television show is much more focused, interesting, and rebellious in its satire on the state of American politics and society.
Ennis wrote the comic books because he was fed up with the status quo of superhero stories, in which the reigning series from Marvel and DC were telling the same narratives and projecting a type of ‘American morality’ onto their readers. The Boys was supposed to serve as an antidote to that narrative. The premise asks: “What if Superman was evil?”, with Ennis prodding its audience to reflect on how they value their heroes and the institutions that defend them.
The TV series attempts to revisit our perception of superheroes for its modern audience. Homelander and The Seven are designed as a commercial operation by the company Vought, which built the serum that gives them their powers. They are advertised to the American people as the heroes who protect the ‘American Dream’.
The series came out at the perfect time, when superhero movies reigned at the box office, and the show often comments on this through its satire, with The Seven working on crossover movie events and songs that devalue what these superheroes do, or more importantly, what evil they can do when the camera is not watching them.
Passengers on a stricken aeroplane
The first time we officially see Homelander doing his superhero job is when he is sent to save passengers on an aeroplane with Queen Maeve, another superhero from The Seven. The pilots are knocked out, and the passengers are frightened for their lives.
Because of Homelander’s delusional view of humanity, due to the abuse he suffered growing up and being tested on at Vought, Homelander decides that these people are not worth saving. They are not worth the effort, as he wants the rest of the public to know that superheroes will not always protect them, but that they should be directed and controlled by the superheroes.
Even Queen Maeve disagrees with him, as she sees a frightened public, including women and children. The passengers on the flight do attempt to save themselves by trying to get into the cockpit, but because Homelander wants them to die in the crash, he threatens them with his laser eyes — like Superman — telling them to stay back. It shows how vicious and uncaring he is, compared to the image projected by Vought of him as a ‘saviour of the people’.
The Boys formed by a rogue CIA operative
Meanwhile, The Boys are formed by William Butcher, a rogue CIA operative who wants to stop the superheroes, and in particular Homelander, at any cost. They come into contact with Hughie, a young man with a dysfunctional father whose girlfriend is killed on the street when one of ‘The Seven’ superheroes, A-Train, who runs into her at super-speed and rips her apart. It is gory and not for the faint of heart, but it gives Hughie a reason to want to kill superheroes and enact his revenge.
We are also introduced to the character Starlight, a young woman who has risen up the Vought ranks and is made one of ‘The Seven’ because of her beauty and naïve view of the company. She is assaulted, manipulated, and objectified by another superhero from ‘The Seven’, The Deep, after which she eventually defects to The Boys and becomes Hughie’s love interest, while also helping to lead the rebellion against Vought and Homelander.
There has been an interesting shift in the perception of the show during its run. It was, and still is, one of the most popular shows on Amazon. It was also praised by the political right for its criticisms of “woke culture”. Of course, the writer and showrunner, Eric Kripke, is very critical of the right wing’s influence in American politics, and over time the show presents its views in a much more blunt manner.
The criticism of “woke culture”, as I and the showrunner see it, is how capitalism has attempted to engage with issues such as diversity performatively, because it believes it can profit from them. Once the pendulum begins to swing, with Homelander (a clear stand-in for Trump) taking power, capital shifts to sell whatever narrative best protects its interests.
An example of this was the infamous Kendall Jenner commercial, in which she walked through a crowd of protestors with a Pepsi can to give to the police, suggesting that the power of drinking Pepsi can bring people together (I guess). The Boys recreated this on the show as a hilarious parody, demonstrating the shallow nature of marketing and capitalism’s feeble attempts to promote itself as “progressive”.
Some on the right are confused
The more worrying perception of the show comes through the character of Homelander. Some people on the right became confused and angry that the show was “presenting him as a villain”, when they believed him to be a complex anti-hero. The show has never presented the character in this way, as I described in the plane scene, which appears in one of the first episodes.
Both Eric Kripke and Anthony Starr, the actor who plays Homelander, have suggested that those who supported Homelander in the past were misguided to think this, as they rightly state that he has always been presented as a villain. He might be a complex villain, as he was raised and tortured to be a ‘product’ by capital to hide the more sinister acts of the company Vought, but he has clearly been presented as a villain throughout the show’s entire run.
As the superheroes edge closer and closer to political power, we see the writers, and Kripke in particular, lean heavily into current political realities. Homelander is clearly represented as Trump. We see the media lean heavily into attacking its political opponents, with Starlight, now fully integrated into The Boys, being used as a scapegoat to attack those who oppose Homelander, labelled as “terrorists”.
We see people being put into camps, much like the detention centres used by ICE to incarcerate alleged illegal migrants. Homelander himself uses religion as a defence for the heinous crimes he commits, and Vought, now fully controlled by Homelander, deploys right-wing political propaganda, including podcasts and ‘manosphere’ content, to stir up his fanbase and target those who oppose the regime.
Amazon to turn it into a franchise
The show is crass, gory, satirical, and rebellious. It is predictable, but a shame nonetheless, that Amazon is attempting to turn this into a franchise, where a spin-off has already been produced and a prequel series exploring one of the older heroes is on the way. It somewhat defeats the purpose of The Boys comic books and the mainline show, which have been critical of superhero franchising in Hollywood and the corporations that pursue it purely for profit.
But the show isn’t backing down in its critique of capital. In the final season, The Boys team come into contact with Stan Edgar, who used to be the head of Vought before Homelander overthrew him. In a conversation with one of The Boys, known as Mother’s Milk, Edgar relays that he wants to be at the head of the company again.
He doesn’t mind if The Boys kill Homelander, because they can just make another one and the cycle of profit can begin again. Even if The Boys kill Homelander, the show is warning us that removing a president like Trump won’t do much until the rotten core of capitalism is ripped out of our society.
The show doesn’t suggest that socialism is the answer, as it remains somewhat timid in offering a solution, beholden, perhaps, to the behemoth of Amazon as a partial reason why it cannot present socialism as the alternative. But it at least makes criticisms, and that is a start. The Boys is a great show, fuelled with political commentary on the current state of America under the reign of Trumpism and his clique, and I highly recommend watching it.
