The Boys Says No To Ideology

Eric Kripke’s The Boys, an adaptation of Garth Ennis’s comic of the same name from a decade earlier, seemed at its release to be a perfect answer to superhero fatigue. The Perfect Answer? I don’t know if anything is perfect. But The Boys does add some special sauce to what is slowly becoming a pretty standard blockbuster template. The show focuses around The Seven, a cynical and intentionally satirical ripoff of the Justice League, as well as the titular Boys, a group trying to take down both the immoral and opportunistic members of the Seven, as well as their parent company, Vought International. It seems, at first, a bit of a cliche premise, a sort of Robocop meets the DC universe thing, but looks can be deceiving, and the pinch of self-awareness I was not expecting to find makes all the difference.

I must admit that, despite having their own circles of fans, creator Eric Kripke’s earlier properties, notably Supernatural, had totally eclipsed my radar when they came out, partly because of my age, and partly because of their slots on the often-mild and sometimes-mediocre cable slots of The CW and NBC. Kripke seems to at least partially agree, for what it’s worth: “I have a filthy sense of humor, and I’ve always had to restrain it for network television.” (Radish). Luckily for Krikpe, and for us, The Boys is no such network show, it’s on Amazon’s Prime Video, and, after Season 2 broke records that only Netflix’s many originals had previously surpassed, it’s looking poised to be the streaming service’s flagship show. It did hit a hiccup with its semi-weekly release schedule and review bombing fiasco, sure, but I don’t think anyone’s thinking about that this many weeks after its finale (Nagelhout).

That’s not to say that Prime hasn’t had their fair share of early hits, which, for me, at least, were The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and SyFy carryover The Expanse. But where those two shows explore settings in either the past or far future in an attempt to consciously distance themselves from our modern chaos, The Boys pulls no punches, and sugars no coats. Through the vehicle of the superhero tale, Kripke takes Garth Ennis’s satire of the Bush-era superhero and makes it sing for modern audiences.

Yeah, yeah, the Big Bad being a purely profit-motivated megacorporation isn’t exactly new to us (I already mentioned Robocop), The Boys’s second season doesn’t stop at the beginner’s critique. Whereas the first season was most notable for its tight writing and for its hypnotizing characters, particularly Antony Starr’s faux-Superman Homelander and Karl Urban’s lovable-but-diabolical Billy Butcher, the second season takes what was already a potent mixture and makes it more 2020. Instead of spotlighting just evangelicals and corporatists, and their slimy, hypocritical personalities, to me, it seems as if the target in Season 2 is the ideology powering the entire enterprise in the first place, and the people that those in power will align with in order to preserve their stream of income, or, better yet, exponentially grow their income.

In Season 2, it’s not only the individual, but the ideology that is toxic, and it holds everybody back, whether personally, or culturally, or universally. There’s good questions to be found in there: Why is the most toxic ideology seemingly the most profitable? What happens when, in the words of Kripke, “authoritarianism and celebrity are combined”? (Itzkoff). If we had a substance that could turn anyone into a Supe, who should really get it? Everybody? Nobody? Sure, it makes me want to twist my head off when I encounter it in real life, but when The Boys tackles right-wing social media troll farms, or the money-hungry faux-progressivism of Vought, or the military-industrial complex, I am literally mesmerized. That’s it. They got it.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. The intricately-paced, tightly-written paradigm set by the first season had to make room for more characters and more subplots, which leaves the front end of the season feeling a little sparse, and blackmail a perhaps too-commonly-used plot device, but it never distracted me from the driving main plot, and the burning question of how the hell are they going to get out of this mess? For a while, too, the season seems to be turning into an unnuanced critique of the edginess of the Trump administration; that’s a bait and switch, luckily, and the season’s final plot twist raises more difficult questions about ideology outside of any one political wind. It might get some people a bit more than a bit unnerved, myself included, but difficult questions are the best ones to ask.

Eric Kripke said, before the release of the first season, “Jesus Christ, I think we could be making one of the most current shows on TV” (Clark). I do wonder how quickly that realization hit him, because he seems to have taken it to heart during the production of the second. So, surprisingly, or perhaps, unsurprisingly, The Boys proves itself more than mere anomaly in its second season, continuing to deliver an expanded, sharp, and often-hilarious satire of our modern society. The New York Times called it ‘Watchmen with jokes’, but Watchmen never attacked ideology as a phenomenon as much as it attacked the power fantasy itself (Hale). The Boys does have jokes, I’ll give them that. It may not work for everyone, and its common cynicism may run a bit too deep for our optimistic comrades, that’s certainly true. However, where another dark superhero tale would revel in fatalism, The Boys never seems to want to commit to any one way of viewing the world, and that’s its strength.