Eric Kripke’s adaptation of Garth Ennis’s comic puts superheroes on a corporate payroll and lets them behave accordingly. Antony Starr’s Homelander is a great television monster; the show around him is cruder than it is clever, and it runs long.
Eric Kripke’s series, adapted from the Garth Ennis comic, starts from a plain question: what would superheroes be like if a company owned them? The answer is Vought, which sells capes the way other firms sell soft drinks, and the Seven, its flagship team, who film adverts in the morning and do as they please in the afternoon. The Boys is about the handful of ordinary people who decide to do something about that. It is good, often better than good, and it has one joke it keeps telling for five seasons of eight episodes.
The way in is Hughie Campbell, played by Jack Quaid as a man who apologises to furniture. In the first episode he loses his girlfriend to A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), a speedster who runs through her on a New York pavement and pauses long enough to say sorry. Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher turns up at the electronics shop where Hughie works, talks in an East End growl and offers him a chance to get even. Urban plays Butcher as a man who enjoys the fight far more than he should, and he gets most of the good lines and knows it.
The series belongs to Antony Starr. His Homelander leads the Seven, a Superman with a flag for a cape, and Starr plays him as a man who has never once been told no and has stopped waiting to be. The trick is the smile. It arrives on cue for cameras and children, holds a beat too long, and goes out like a light the moment the crowd looks away. Michael Ground’s costume does the rest: the cape is a stitched flag and the suit is padded until he looks carved rather than dressed. We were frightened by him, properly frightened, in a first-season scene where he does nothing but stand in a room and let someone work out what he could do if he chose. We had not expected that from a man in tights.
The corporate side is where the writing is sharpest. Elisabeth Shue’s Madelyn Stillwell runs the heroes as a brand manager, breastfeeding in one scene and arranging a cover-up in the next, and Shue never once lets us see her sweat. Colby Minifie’s Ashley Barrett is the publicist who cleans up after everyone and appears to age by the hour. Erin Moriarty’s Annie January arrives as Starlight, the new recruit who believes in all of it, and the first episode shows her exactly what the job costs when Chace Crawford’s Deep gets her alone. Moriarty plays the disillusionment slowly, over seasons, and it holds.
It looks expensive in the right places. Six cinematographers are credited, Dan Stoloff and Dylan MacLeod among them, and the look stays consistent across them: Vought’s tower is glass and white and lit like a phone launch, while Butcher’s team hides in a basement under a single bare bulb. Christopher Lennertz’s score plays patriotic brass straight and lets it curdle by the end of the phrase. The violence is the show’s signature, and it is filmed as slapstick: a body comes apart in a puff of red, and the camera stays on the people standing in what is left.
The Boys themselves are the weaker half. Tomer Capone’s Frenchie and Laz Alonso’s Mother’s Milk are handed backstories that arrive in chunks and stall the plot each time. Karen Fukuhara’s Kimiko does not speak for most of the first season, and the show mostly needs her for the fights. The satire is loud. Vought is the villain; the script says so, the characters say so, and by the fourth season we were tired, and then annoyed at being tired of a show that had once surprised us. There are only so many times a hero can do something appalling in slow motion before the shock becomes a schedule.
Set against the Watchmen comic, and the 2019 series made from it, this is cruder, funnier and less interested in ideas. Start with the first season, which is the tightest, and see whether the smile does to you what it did to us. It carries an 18 and earns every point of it.
