The Boys is a television show based on a comic series of the same name, set in a universe where superheroes are privately owned by a corporation called “Vought.” In the show, superheroes aren’t shown to be all good, but instead are sometimes shown as extremely flawed or even downright evil in many ways. The purpose is seemingly to build a universe where superheroes are more realistic and human, instead of just being good crime fighters. “The Boys” are a group of protagonists who fight back against these corrupt heroes. The show is currently finished with its fourth season, with the fifth scheduled to release in 2026. The show itself is widely liked by its audience. Despite my criticisms, I still like The Boys. It’s a fun show with a lot of character and interesting choices, it just has some flaws.
Before getting into the issues with the show, let’s go over what the show does right. Firstly, a lot of the characters, especially the comic relief characters, are fun to watch. The dynamics among the main characters are generally strong, and the dialogue for most characters is written well. The show’s best quality is its ability to build suspense, especially with the main antagonist, Homelander. Homelander is shown to be a pretty erratic character, and you never fully know what he’s about to do to someone. Homelander is also marketable as a character. Even if you’ve never watched the show, there’s a high chance you’ve heard of Homelander, and without him, The Boys would be much less enjoyable to watch, and probably less well known. I have my grievances with how his character is written in recent episodes, but I will bring those up later. Other well written characters include the anti-hero Billy Butcher and Black Noir (in all four seasons). I also personally just couldn’t stop watching, to be honest. I still remember staying up to 2:00 AM on a school night to finish the first season. It really was that good.
Despite it being entertaining, the show also has many negatives, some minor, and some making it legitimately difficult to watch at times. To start with minor gripes, use of gore has become irritatingly common in later seasons, making it feel cheap. In the first season, gore was really only used when really important or crazy scenes occurred, and in later seasons it’s just played for laughs half the time. It really does make the tone of certain scenes feel way less serious, and makes it all feel like it exists primarily for the shock factor.
Another issue is the insane amount of plot armor. I get it, plot armor is generally necessary for shows, but in this show it simply makes the boys look incredibly incompetent and stupid. The most obvious example of plot armor is Homelander himself. In the first season we never see Homelander, the most powerful superhero on the planet, take much damage. Later on, however, we see just one other superhero hold their own against him, and we also get a scene where three people with superpowers almost kill him. One of the main objectives of the boys is to kill Homelander, so if the boys were in any way competent, they would’ve already disposed of him. The fact that they haven’t implies incompetence. He has not truly been shown to be a juggernaut in any way.
We also used to see the boys use creative solutions to hurt superheroes or knock them out of commission. They used these creative tactics because they were an underground organization with minimal funding at this point. In later seasons, this completely changes. The once creative solutions became blatantly idiotic and not well thought out, with one scene including a protagonist throwing a small bottle of acid on a literal superhero, a bottle that probably wouldn’t even kill a “normal” person. Keep in mind, this was also when the boys had the backing of many more people and the collection of more funds. Seems like the more backing they have, the less effective the boys become.
Finally, we get to one of the most glaring issues with the show. It’s hyper-politicized. Now, I don’t think it’s wrong to include political satire in your show. However, when the satire ends up destroying the worldbuilding, and in some cases, even the characters of your show, you need to tone it down. In Season One, the political messaging was a lot more subtle, and characters like Homelander were treated less like parodies and more like distinct characters. By the fourth season, everything had changed. Homelander is now a complete parody of President Donald Trump, with the character going from being incredibly cunning and intelligent to being brash, incompetent, and almost incapable of making good decisions on his own. In fact, the main reason why he was able to further his own interests in Season Four was because the writers added a new character named “Sister Sage” to the cast. Sage is an example of an intelligent character written by unintelligent people, because she never comes off as smart, she just “knows” what will happen next. Your character doesn’t seem intelligent if after everything ends, they walk out and say “Yep, that was all me. All according to plan.” What all of this means is that the writers, out of a vehement hatred for Trump, torpedoed one of the best characters in the show. On top of that, they “made up” for the intelligence loss they gave him by making up an entirely new character who doesn’t even seem smart at all. Are you starting to see the issue here?
If that wasn’t enough to convince you, it would be important to look at the worldbuilding getting absolutely destroyed by the incessant hatred the writers have for Trumpists. First of all, Vought is initially depicted as a juggernaut in the media, being a gigantic megacorporation that essentially acts as “mainstream news.” Later on, however, a scene unfolds where some of the boys enter a “conspiracy theory” convention called TruthCon. The issue is, TruthCon is backed by Vought. The writers clearly wanted to make it seem like the convention goers were conspiracy theorists, similar to the Qanon and Great Replacement theorists in our world. People who go to TruthCon are literally called members of the “alt-supe” movement, clearly meant to reference the “alt-right” movement in our world. However, this makes no sense because those theorists are not backed by the mainstream media in our world. Their equivalents in The Boys universe are though. The writers wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wished to portray people who supported Vought (allegories for Trumpists) as insane conspiracy theories, but also wanted them to be directly backed BY the mainstream media because Vought IS the mainstream media. Either portray them as crazy conspiracy theorists or have them be backed by Vought, but doing both is patently ridiculous.
I could go on about the political satire taking primacy over everything else and making the series worse, as examples like this are littered around the later seasons, especially in Season Four. However, I think I’ve made my point clear here. I do hope Season Five pivots away from this kind of writing, but with how America’s political climate has deteriorated, and announcements and advertisements from creators of the show clearly hinting to more political themes, I’m not particularly hopeful.
The Boys may be a fun watch that I recommend to practically everyone, but it has many issues that are seemingly getting worse as the show goes on, and later seasons really shouldn’t be taken seriously as an allegory for our world.
