#REVIEW: The Boys, Season 3

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I think this is, in total, my fourth or fifth piece about Amazon Prime’s The Boys, and each time I’ve written about it my enthusiasm for the show has deepened. Well, at this point, the third season has finished– the finale was two days ago– and, well. Go watch this fuckin’ show. I don’t know how else to put it. The show has, three seasons in, so thoroughly outgrown its source material that it isn’t even telling the same story any longer, and that’s not an exaggeration. I went through the differences between the show and the comics with my wife after the finale and it is a lengthy list, not to mention that the show rather comprehensively eliminated any chance of ending the way the comics do this season. And every divergence the show has made from the comics has improved the show. This isn’t like Game of Thrones, which decided to change things from the books by adding more rape.

(And while we’re talking about that, this show is enormously better to its woman characters than the comics ever were.)

I don’t really watch a lot of television, to be honest, so calling this “the best-acted show on TV” is … kinda meaningless coming from me, but I will say that it’s really difficult for me to imagine any show loaded with more acting talent than this one has. I will repeat what I said in my last piece about this show: Antony Starr is one of the most terrifying TV villains I’ve ever encountered, and while the show passed up a couple of chances to kill characters this season, I really do feel like there isn’t anyone that has plot armor. And given where they went with a certain major plot line in the comics that only just started showing up in the show, I wouldn’t even necessarily be surprised if they killed Homelander off early next season to move on to this other thing. Will they do that? Probably not. But not definitely not, and at least one other major character has a death sentence hanging over his head right now.

So, yeah. Three seasons in, we have moved to unapologetic, full-throated endorsement of this show. It’s fantastic. You should be watching it, and I can’t wait for Season Four.

On Season 3 of THE BOYS

Luther M. Siler

This will be the third time I have written about Amazon Prime’s series The Boys, based on the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book of the same name, in this space. The first piece I wrote about it started with a content warning for “everything,” and mainly talked about the fact that I thought the show was problematic as hell, leaning way too much into sexism and rape and fridging female characters than anything I could be comfortable with recommending, but … well … if you could get past that awfulness, there was a pretty good show in there, somehow?

Then Season 2 rolled around, and they’d shed most of Ennis’ bullshit from the first season, in general treating their female characters a lot better, not relying on rape as a driver of the plot at all, and still keeping the insanely hyperviolent and raunchy tone of the first season, which moved the show from “Eh, if you were curious already, check it out, but don’t pay for Amazon Prime for this” to “Well, don’t pay for Amazon Prime just for this, but if you already have it, you probably ought to watch an episode or two and see what you think.”

We are, as of right now, three episodes into Season 3; my understanding is that new episodes are going to drop on Friday, although I’m not 100% sure what the actual schedule is– in other words, I’m not sure if they gave us three episodes to start and there will be 3 more this Friday, or if it’ll be on a more traditional one-episode-a-week schedule, or what, but we’re three episodes in. The season isn’t finished.

But based on those three episodes, and continuing to keep in mind that this show is not for everyone, and that I really can’t emphasize enough how much bodies literally exploding into chunky red sauce has been a part of this season, and there was a sequence in the first episode that very nearly had me hiding behind the couch …

I know Amazon Prime is $129 a year now, but … yeah, you need to be watching The Boys, if your constitution can handle it. If you know you can’t, go in peace and ignore this. But if you can?

This show has some of the best acting I have ever seen on a TV screen. Antony Starr as the Homelander is absolutely fucking terrifying in a way that I have never seen in a television character before. Like, my heart rate shoots up whenever he’s on screen. I want him to play the Joker so badly I can taste it. Karl Urban is amazing. Giancarlo Esposito is amazing. Jack Quaid is amazing. Erin Moriarty and Chance Crawford and Jessie Usher and oh my God Colby Minifie are amazing. Everyone with a role on this show is doing the job of their lives.

(Discovers that Mesmer, from last season, was Haley Joel fucking Osment, and has to take a moment.)

I really cannot express enough how much you need to see the clinic that Antony Starr is putting on here, though, managing to marry being an angry, unstable god with somebody who was very clearly so broken as a child that you almost feel sorry for him. Until, of course, you realize he’s fantasizing about killing every living person in New York City in the same disconnected, unconcerned way you might think for half a second before stepping on a bug. But you can see the scared little kid in him, and it’s just so good. And the writers, who are continuing to do adaptations The Right Way, have made it so clear that this show doesn’t even vaguely understand the concept of Plot Armor that there is literally not a single second where this man is on screen where you’re not worried about him doing something terrible at any moment. It’s been years since I had to take time to calm down after watching a TV show, and we’re only three episodes into this season and they’ve done it to me three times.

So, yeah. There’s still plenty of time for shit to go wrong, but at this point, and without relinquishing any of the previous warnings attached to previous seasons, this show is moving to You Need To Be Watching This. I’ll update again once the season is over.

#REVIEW: The Boys, Season 2

Luther M. Siler

Before I get into the post itself, I just want to point out that I find it kind of funny that I made a point of mentioning the other day that I hadn’t missed a post since April, and then bloody went and forgot to post yesterday until almost 11:30, at which point my inner fuck it, nobody is paying me for this kicked in and I didn’t bother throwing something onto the site just to check off the day. In my defense, yesterday was a deeply weird, schedule-murdering sort of day, the kind of day where you wake up with a certain set of expectations on how the day is going to go and then those expectations are rather rudely tossed onto their ear before you’ve finished your coffee.

What we did manage to do was finish the second season of The Boys. And while I watched the first season by myself, my wife was along for the ride for the entire season this time, thus the “we” and the slightly longer amount of time elapsing before its release and me managing to watch it all. The first season of The Boys was … messy. Real messy. To the point where I felt kind of squicky about recommending people watch it.

The second season was phenomenal.

Now, let’s not misrepresent things: The Boys is still hyper-violent (exploding heads make up more of the season’s plot points than you might typically see in a TV show, and there’s a thing that happens with a whale that is, like, wow) and profane and a lot of other stuff, but while the first season followed the comic books into leaning way too hard into sexual violence and rape than anything really needs to be, the second season has none of that. In general, the female characters are treated much better this season; there’s no fridging at all, and most of the new characters introduced are women.

This show does a couple of things that I really like. First, the acting remains absolutely top-tier across the damn board. Antony Starr as Homelander is Goddamned amazing. This is the role of Karl Urban’s life. The relationship between Jack Quaid and Erin Moriarty’s Hughie and Starlight is sweet and awkward in all sorts of adorable ways. And Giancarlo Esposito is in this show and I praised four other actors before I got around to mentioning him. I mean, come on. And while I wasn’t happy with the semi-redemption arc Chace Crawford’s The Deep got last season, his role this season is far more interesting than last year’s. And his character is responsible for what might be the single greatest cameo in the history of television. You wouldn’t think that the acting and the character work would be the highlight of a show that spends fully three-fourths of a season making you think a head might literally explode at any given moment, but it absolutely is.

(Also, I want every shirt that Mother’s Milk wears during the series. Every single one.)

The second thing that I love about the show is how it has handled adapting the comic book, and it’s kind of fascinating to me that my other example of an outstanding adaptation, The Walking Dead, is also an adaptation to TV of a comic book series. This is the right way to adapt things, guys: take what you think works from the original material and then twist it and fuck with it however you want so that the people who know the source material don’t necessarily know what’s coming next. Something happens at the end that manages to recast the entire first two seasons as a prequel, at least of sorts, to the place where the entire comic series starts. And while at least part of this season is taken, broadly, from the comic book, a huge chunk of it isn’t, and there’s no smug “I know what’s going to happen at the Red Wedding!” sort of scenes for people who have read the comics. I knew one reveal was coming about one character, and one major reveal from the end of the comic series appears to not be the case in the TV series, based on about four seconds of footage in the second-to-last episode. So they’re definitely going their own way here.

The last time I talked about this show, I ended with “If you think this is something you might like, and you’ve already got Amazon Prime, maybe check it out.” I’m still not telling you to get Amazon Prime just for the show, but it’s definitely a reason to get Prime now, as opposed to an ancillary side benefit, and if you already have the service you should strongly consider checking it out if the ultraviolence isn’t going to push you away.

In which I recommend something problematic: on THE BOYS

Luther M. Siler

Trigger warning. For, like, everything. If you’re the type of person who has been helped by a trigger warning in the past, don’t bother reading this post and avoid this show like the plague.

Let’s get some stuff out of the way right away about the first season of The Boys, the Amazon Prime adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson “What if superheroes were all fucked-up assholes?” comic series of the same name:

  • Not one but two male characters’ prime motivation is to avenge the death of, respectively, a girlfriend and a wife. The girlfriend is fridged within fifteen minutes or so of the start of the first episode.
  • While the lone female member of the “good guys,” such as they are, is never actually referred to as The Female as she is in the comics, she never talks.
  • This is an insanely graphically violent show; at one point an infant is used as a weapon. Multiple people are murdered with– not by— a baby. That is not a joke. That’s a thing that happens.
  • While it doesn’t happen on screen, and in fact it’s toned down from what happens in the comics (“toned down from the comics” is a recurring theme) the main female character is raped in her first episode.

There is, in other words, a lot of lazy, sexist writing in this program, particularly in the initial episode. And I would not for a second get on the case of anyone who looked at those four bullet points and went “Nope, not for me.” Honestly, had I not been familiar with the comic series from when it came out, I probably wouldn’t have made it past the first episode either. But I was curious about how they were going to adapt the series (12 graphic novels, so not at all a small amount of source material) to television.

And here’s the thing: all of the stuff in those bullet points is in the comics, and in general this is a pretty loose adaptation of the source material. All of the decisions that the television producers made– every change that they introduced– kind of blunt the bullshitty edges of what happened in the comics. They certainly don’t turn away from how over the top The Boys was, but this isn’t Game of Thrones, where they took a series with a bunch of sexism and rape and decided the best thing to do with it was to add more sexism and rape. And the show is independent enough from the comics that by the end of the first season I have no idea where they’re planning on going with it next season. That, for me, is always a win for an adaptation.

Here’s some more good news: the acting, across the board, is absolutely phenomenal, and one of the cool things about having a show where damn near every character is a deranged mess of a human being is that it gives every actor something to really dig into with their character. Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher and Antony Starr as the Homelander are particular standouts– I don’t know what sorts of acting awards someone on this program might be eligible for, but Starr in particular needs to be up for something for this role. Chace Crawford’s portrayal of The Deep is also worth mentioning– although, as the rapist mentioned above, the fact that he sort of gets a redemption arc, or is at least eventually portrayed as a sympathetic character complete with his own sexual assault, is also … skeevy.

And the thing is, everybody is fucked up in this show. All of them. There are no characters without some damage to them in The Boys, and there are no underwritten roles, either– even The Character Previously Known As The Female has some interesting moments, and watching the cast inhabit this world is tremendously compelling– and that, to me, is more than enough to make overlooking the more troublesome and lazy aspects of the show and its premise possible. Plus, again for me personally, I first read these books when they came out in 2006 and so nothing about the problematic aspects of the story is new. Which, I think, might make me a bit more likely to look past them than some other people.

Your mileage, obviously, may vary. And with Amazon Prime at $99 a year I’m not about to tell you to subscribe in order to watch this. But if you already were, and you were on the fence about the show? Definitely give it a couple of episodes and see if it grabs you.

A topic for discussion

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

How fucked-up and wrong does something have to be before you find yourself unable to recommend it? Or, alternatively, how good does something have to be before you find yourself recommending it despite its multitude of problems?

No reason.