Ooh, that’s an easy one

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My friends’ lives are all falling apart, and if you read this and think I might be talking about you, rest assured that I probably am, but also be aware that I’m talking about at least three other people in addition to you. So guess what I plan to spend tonight thinking about?

I do not remember the last time I legitimately binged a season of a show. And I wasn’t even all that excited about this until seeing the trailer. But it looks like they’ve gotten everything absolutely right. I’mma just black out August 5 on my calendar, I think.

#REVIEW: The Boys, Season 3

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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

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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

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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 all I do is review things now

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This week was seven hundred years long and featured hospitals and shingles— the disease, not the roof covering–, neither of which I was directly involved in, but I’m tired and utterly refuse to brain in any significant capacity right now. Luckily I have massive megacorporations providing entertainment to soothe me. So: two brief mini-reviews.

I have watched both episodes of The Mandalorian that have been released, and it’s pretty solid. It’s definitely Star Wars– the series not feeling right was my second biggest fear behind the fact that it was going to secretly be about Boba Fett, which it isn’t– and while I wasn’t sold on the music or the humor after the first episode I was right in suspecting that I just needed to get used to it. My favorite thing about the show so far is that it subtly reinforces the idea that Mandalorians aren’t actually the big tough badasses that Star Wars have been pretending they are for years– Boba Fett got killed by a blind man with a stick and a monster that couldn’t move, and the Mandalorian (who still doesn’t have a name) gets his ass kicked by Jawas in the second episode. I mean, it’s hilarious, but still. I don’t know that this is worth getting Disney+ for all by itself, but if you’re a Star Wars sort of person you probably already have your subscription and have watched the show already.

I have beaten this now, and everything I said in my early impressions post still holds: this is basically a Fallout game, only more Westerny and less post-apocalyptic, and with Mass Effect/Dragon Age-style companions. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll get along with it perfectly well, and unlike the last Dragon Age game I was actually able to finish it without dying of boredom, but I’m starting to think that unless someone does something to radically shake up how this genre works I think I’m going to tap out of it now, because long quest chains and ceaseless fetch quests just aren’t fun for me anymore. I damn near turned the game off when one character literally asked me to go ask another character if a poster he’d ordered had arrived yet, and I accidentally screwed up a quest late in the game involving modeling for an NPC and when I looked up what might have happened had I not messed it up I realized that there were 10,000 more things to do for it and I’d have been howling and throwing shit at the walls by the end of it. It’s mostly well-written and entertaining beyond that, but this game demands a bit more patience than I actually have available to me right now. I might go through it once more to see how some quests might go when I make different choices, but it won’t be happening for a while.