“Hughie, you’re a good lad,” says Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a merry murderer, to Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), the beta-male braveheart leading Amazon’s superhero satire, “The Boys.” Butcher is complimenting Hughie on his refusal to accept recompense from Vought International, a company that manages A-Train, a fiending Flash that vaporized Hughie’s girlfriend for the sin of stepping off of a New York City sidewalk. Having ripped up a $45,000 check and enlisted in Butcher’s band of ragtag renegades, Hughie might not get relief, but someone is going to suffer.
A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is one of the Seven, a jaundiced Justice League. When its members aren’t rolling out the red-carpet for a movie premier, they function as a for-hire police force, patrolling the streets and the skies.
“The Boys” was first a comic, a trenchant takedown of American warmongering, published in 2006, written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Darick Robertson. Ennis’ previous works (“Preacher” and “Punisher”) took aim at the little things in life: the internal inconsistencies of Christianity, say, or the generational traumas of war.
The show is at its best when it’s all cocks-and-glocks buffoonery, which is partly explained by its executive producers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Rogen, producer and star of such deft political tracts as “The Long Shot” and “The Interview,” also helps to explain its plodding unsubtlety. Like The Deep, a predatory Aquaman played by Chace Crawford (he sexually assaults a member of the Seven in Vought’s faux-Arthurian boardroom), the show lacks depth.
Early on, there’s hope, elegantly embodied by two neologisms: “supe” and “super-abled.” This non-binary nomenclature implies an allotment of moral agency for our caped crusaders. But no.
“The Boys” is a raucous send-up of superheroes, drawing its avatars indiscriminately from the Marvel and DC canons. Those properties construct their characters on a central conceit: the immutable goodness of superheroes. “The Boys” creates an assumptive antipode. The badness of superheroes is a fait accompli.
Like Homelander (Antony Starr), Fuhrer of the Seven, a sinister Superman and Uber mensch Hitler would have hoorayed, the problems originate with leadership. Eric Kripke adapted the comic. He might not have been the best candidate to satirize our superhero zeitgeist, though. “Supernatural,” a show that he created and helmed during its first half-decade on air, was an unironic encomium to toxic masculinity and white messianism. Ultimately, “The Boys” is a nihilistic vision of politics that only a bunch of privileged White guys would endorse.
The show takes its name from a group of gleeful vulgarians. Hughie is recruited by its leader, Billy Butcher, a man of pure vigilantism, who sends the boys on a season-long sojourn to kill, maim and expose the supes for the psychos they are. To win, he’d destroy the world, and what a textured world it is. The show moves from boardrooms to back alleys, beautiful binaries depicted in chrome and cum and blood and glass. The show might not inspect its universe, but it doesn’t sanitize it either.
Their enemies are the Seven. There’s Queen Maeve, the drunk Wonder Woman, and Black Noir, an unintentional Uncle Tom. Translucent is a puerile peeping tom. The Deep is there, and A-Train and Homelander, too. Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is the Seven’s newest member, an embodiment of virtue and the show’s Me-Too martyr.
Vought’s headquarters is a gleaming, glass phallus in the heart of New York City. Sitting at the head of hero management is Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue), a suited sentinel of feminism-cum-patriarchy, a Sheryl Sandberg for the supes. A lactating new mother, her character is marginally complicated by an Oedipal arrangement: Homelander’s seething need for Stillwell’s milk and motherly love. As the saying goes, behind every great man is a great woman is a raving lunatic.
Violence falls disproportionately on the women. Characters of color, the few that there are, become scions of twice-as-goodism. This isn’t a critique of white supremacy and patriarchy, it’s a meticulous model of it.
The world’s civilians are impotent, killed constantly. It seems that the people will always be a gormless mass, in thrall to the powerful. Watching the show, you’d think that protest has never resulted in systemic change. But American history is littered with the ghosts of iconoclasts, from abolitionists to civil rights organizers. It is also a memorial to the madmen and -women who endorsed slavery and segregation and mass incarceration.
So when Butcher, in the neon lights of Times Square, explains to Hughie that “movie tickets, merchandise, theme parks, videogames, a multi-billion dollar global industry supported by corporate lobbyists and politicians on both sides” indemnify superheroes, he’s forgetting one crucial co-signer: the people.