Amazon’s The Boys Tests the Limits of Superhero Fatigue

Such is the reality The Boys reveals behind the idolatry: greed and grift and outright homicide, all the while preaching exceptionalism and sanctimony to the outside world. As one Amazon user wrote in a review of the comic’s first collected edition, “Picture Civil War mixed with Game of Thrones and this is what you get.” The best of the palace intrigue comes by way of Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue), a Vought executive who manages by manipulation, subterfuging, and strong-arming her charges in deference to Vought’s finances and agenda. Shue turns in a revelatory performance, especially in Stillwell’s psychologically fraught relationship with Homelander—by turn steely and seductive, a Cersei Lannister of superpowers.

Even casual comic-book readers will see the Seven as an obvious analogue of DC’s Justice League. A-Train has the foot speed of the Flash, and the Deep is Aquaman down to his friendships with dolphins; Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) are able stand-ins for Wonder Woman and Batman. This mapping highlights The Boys‘ true challenge: How many superheroes do you have room for?

Such is the reality The Boys reveals behind the idolatry: greed and grift and outright homicide, all the while preaching exceptionalism and sanctimony.

When The Boys first hit comic-book shops in 2006, popular culture at large hadn’t been quite so overrun by capes and costumes. Superman and Batman had gotten franchises, as had Marvel heroes like Hulk and Spider-Man, but comics had yet to become the one-stop shop for film and TV development execs. The X-Men movies were the only ones that even toyed with a larger connected universe.

Since then, we’ve seen not just superheroes but superhero meta-commentary enter the Hollywood pipeline. Heroes became assholes in a series of book-to-screen projects, from Watchmen and Kick-Ass to Wanted and Powers. In most cases, the results left viewers wanting. Comic books playing with comic-book tropes have always spoken to an in-crowd, complicating the already formidable degree of difficulty in bringing comics to the screen. In book form, Watchmen and Powers were packed with Easter eggs and subtext that delighted longtime readers. In film and TV form, respectively, the attempts to replicate that layering weighed down the result.

Now that HBO is readapting Watchmen into an episodic series, it seems to be doing so with caution, skirting the original entirely. Not so for The Boys, which is so hopped up on its own frenetic energy that it dares you not to buy in. Yes, those who read the comic will appreciate that Simon Pegg, the original inspiration for Hughie, plays Hughie’s father. Yes, those who love comics will thrill to the throwaway gags. But there are a lot of other people out there—the ones already awash in superheroes, the ones who look ahead at Marvel’s Phase Four and the Arrowverse and Netflix’s Millarverse and every other large-scale comic-book IP push out there and can’t help but feel fatigue setting in.

That effectively makes The Boys a niche project, an leeringly uncouth cousin to The Handmaid’s Tale and Catastrophe and Amazon’s other award-winning series. And thank Jor-El for that—not only because it makes for a liberating, all-id meditation on power and hypocrisy, but because I don’t know how many more cinematic universes I can take.