The Boys Was Better Before It Was About Donald Trump

Final seasons are always hard to pull off, especially for genre shows that managed to capture the zeitgeist earlier in their run. Look no further than Game of Thrones to see how even the most popular TV sagas can struggle to land the plane while doing justice to all their disparate elements and still pleasing fans. But what makes the final season of The Boys especially disappointing is how completely the Amazon Prime series lost the satirical edge that once made it stand out in a crowded superhero landscape. By leaning into ripped-from-the-headlines plots rather than seeking out under-discussed fault lines in the culture, and specifically by imitating the real-life actions of President Donald Trump, The Boys is ending its run feeling completely stale.

Let's take a moment to remember the good times. When the first season of The Boys (adapted from the comic series of the same name by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson) premiered back in summer 2019, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was at its cultural peak — and therefore ripe for a takedown. Just months after Avengers: Endgame shattered global box office records to the tune of Chris Evans' Captain America finally saying "Avengers assemble," The Boys opened with an arrogant superhero accidentally killing the human girlfriend of protagonist Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) by running straight through her. It played like a perfect parody of how Marvel superheroes spent more time teasing the next franchise installment than saving lives, or how DC superheroes under director Zack Snyder inflicted devastating violence on screen without much care for collateral damage. These critiques were perfectly embodied in the villainous "superhero" Homelander (Antony Starr), who combined Superman's superpowers and Captain America's patriotic iconography with a psychopathic disregard for human life. But The Boys didn't stop there. 

Even more devastating was how the show expanded its satire past Marvel's and DC's characters to target the real-life corporate business models behind them. It quickly became clear that Vought, the corporate employer of superheroes like Homelander and the rest of "The Seven," is a Disney-like media empire with its own parody MCU films, as well as a pharmaceutical company and a military contractor. Unnecessary wars and expensive medicine are two of Americans' most frequent political complaints, and associating them with the superheroes who have so defined 21st century American pop culture is a nasty read of our society, suggesting that these heroic fantasies had become so popular precisely because they serve as a smiling face for the military-industrial complex. The fact that Captain Marvel screenings earlier in 2019 had been preceded by Air Force recruitment ads really helped the critique hit home. The Boys also seemed to be biting the hand that fed it, since Amazon is also a corporate leviathan that contracts with the U.S. government. That felt much braver than, for example, Netflix making Black Mirror episodes about how addictive Netflix can be. 

ALSO READ: The complete guide to spring TV

The show pulled these threads even further in Season 2, directly connecting early superheroes like Stormfront (Aya Cash) to the human experiments of Nazi scientists like Josef Mengele. Legendary comics writer Alan Moore had previously earned scorn from superhero fans for describing the genre as inherently fascist, but The Boys demonstrated how clearly that lineage can be drawn. The show also evoked another of the great critiques of MCU superhero culture, centered on its total lack of sexuality. In the great essay "Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny," RS Benedict wrote, "Today's stars are action figures, not action heroes. Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win, like Thor did when he got fat in Endgame." So the show presents Homelander, a golden god, as mainly taking libidinal pleasure from drinking breast milk and fathering a child via rape. At the same time, the Season 3 standout episode "Herogasm" demonstrated just how depraved sexually active superheroes could be. 

But as the seasons progressed, The Boys started to lose its way. It didn't help that the show became a full-on franchise, complete with a spin-off show (Gen V) and an animated anthology (The Boys Presents: Diabolical), with a prequel series (Vought Rising) still in the works. In other words, The Boys became the exact type of cultural product it had parodied so ruthlessly. It's not hard to see how this type of expansion can lead to diluted storytelling; after all, it's exactly what happened to the MCU. 

As part of this dilution, The Boys started imitating real life instead of seeking out connective tissue. Homelander was initially a terrifying parody of both American arrogance and infantilization, but explicitly became a reflection of Trump specifically: seeking support from right-wing Americans, killing people in broad daylight to see if he could get away with it (as Trump once bragged he could do), and even taking control of the White House. Season 4 evoked the imagery of the pro-Trump Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, and ended with the establishment of "freedom camps" basically indistinguishable from real-life ICE internment camps. 

Ahead of Season 3, showrunner Eric Kripke told Rolling Stone in a 2022 interview that Homelander has "always been a Trump analogue for me," but added, "I'll admit to being a little more bald this season than I have in past seasons. But the world is getting more coarse and less elegant." It's understandable that Kripke and his writing team felt "angrier and more scared" as the years went on, and they seemingly had good intentions in trying to use their hit show to highlight the most monstrous elements of contemporary American government, but we already have the news for that. Such explicit comparisons to real-life figures are also inherently fragile. Marvel's X-Men have often evoked civil rights struggles, but those parallels have a hard limit since marginalized people in real life can't actually shoot lasers from their eyes. Yes, Trump is a powerful and terrifying figure, but also a ridiculous and fatuous one. Comparing him to Superman actually does more to compliment Trump than effectively mock him. 

At the same time, Kripke has elevated his former Supernatural star Jensen Ackles into a lead role as Soldier Boy, another Captain America analogue from World War II. But where Homelander brings out both the overwhelming power and eerie sexual repression of America, Soldier Boy is mostly just a cool badass who swears and has lots of sex. The fact that the show keeps bringing him back (he's even set to feature prominently in the forthcoming Vought Rising) indicates that there's no real parody here; Soldier Boy is just supposed to be an awesome character that fans should want to see again. 

Add to this the fact that The Boys also ruthlessly parodied one of Trump's biggest political critics, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the form of head-exploding political climber Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), and The Boys' political parody has really lost direction. Trump is bad, the show is saying, but his enemies are equally bad, and actually America is still awesome because we won World War II? It's incoherent, and starts to feel like laziness, with the show just basing characters and stories off news items instead of pushing its own ideas to new ends. 

That's how we wind up with The Boys Season 5, in which superheroes are taking innocent people to internment camps while recording TikToks — the kind of thing you see every day on the real internet. It's unsatisfying to watch because it's not saying anything new. Of all the horrible and horrifying things on The Boys, the most deadening idea of all is that in a world overrun with people who can fly and breathe underwater and shoot lightbeams from their hands, everything else would be exactly the same. 

The series finale of The Boys premieres May 20 on Prime Video.