It’s a bird! - it’s a plane! - it’s … a little unremarkable?

You probably know the vibes by now. Super-heroes represent such a large part of modern pop culture that The Boys is able to purport a world in which they’re actually all assholes. Normally, I’d welcome this level of subversion with open arms - but Amazon’s bingey adaptation of a popular graphic novel is so high off its own cynicism that it’s harder and harder to keep track of the deviation.

Huey (Jack Quaid) is a proxy for the very same comic book nerd (and yes, I realise this is a racial slur) that Amazon presumes is tuning in. Pissed off at most of the Xmen movies, still rattling off time travel theories about the Avengers franchise, speculating feverishly as to when and how Dr. Doom shall cast a sinister cloud across Marvel’s cinematic universe. (We could make a little game of you guessing which of these I’m partaking in.) The Batman crowd is still furious at the idea that Robert Pattinson, a proper actor, would dare besmirch their beloved property with emo energy he in fact shed long ago. I’m not anti- comic books or comic book culture, I assure you ... I’m just trying to demonstrate the level of self-awareness The Boys practises, every few atrocities or so, in order to believe its own anarchic hype.

So, yes, ahem, Huey. In season 1 a young man with a healthy collector’s lifestyle - vintage issues, vintage action figurines, vintage posters, vintage everything - questions his love for superheroes when a particularly speedy one bolts right through his girlfriend on the sidewalk; covering him in her blood and some of her flesh. That speedster is one-seventh of a group called (I want to believe this is deliberately snarky) The Seven, whose world-saving exploits are sponsored and sometimes puppetered by a billion-dollar corporation called Vaught. 

All of this is perfectly conceivable. Where we must suspend just a little bit of belief is at the wonder of pure coincidence: Huey being recruited before long by a ragtag group of hero-despising mercenaries, and also Huey falling instantly in love with Starlight (Erin Moriarty), The Seven’s newest and shiniest force of nature.

Across both seasons, the centre of the superheroic world and this series is Homelander: an ultra-patriot whose brand is a chilling mash-up of Captain America, Superman, Bush-era foreign policy, and Adolf Hitler’s wettest Aryan dream. (Also, Banshee’s Anthony Starr). The Boys, at least on television, is about how torturously slowly Homelander’s world will cave in around him, and in what circumstances. Will he be undone by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), the ridiculously hard Briton whose wife Homelander rapes and fathers a super-child with? Will he be thoroughly undermined, perhaps even felled in some kind of nuclear fistfight, in battle with another ‘super’? By an exhausted teammate, perhaps, that’s seen him abandon an airplane full of screaming passengers, or a not-so-new-kid on the block more callous than he is? Inversely, what fate will befall Huey and the gang, and will he ever get to romance dear Starlight in peace?

A lot of credit is due, I suspect, to the graphic novel the story comes from. Every now and then, the TV show accomplishes the rare feat of conveying just how breathtakingly dangerous it would feel to inhabit the same space as a super-being. The producers also know when and where to turn on the juice, only sparingly using special effects to punctuate somewhat middling chapters. I say ‘middling’ because The Boys and its characters spend an awful lot of time standing around and merely discussing what will or won’t happen, instead of actually negotiating fallout. 

Everything is laced with just enough prospect and promise to be more addictive and bingeable than unimaginative and frustrating, because for once we’re watching a comic book saga without an historical, globally recognizable link to canon, mythos. But at a certain point that feels insufficient, and an ironic cynicism towards its medium doesn’t quite do the trick either. 

I only got round to finishing season 1 because the homegirl Aya Cash (You’re The Worst) was cast as Stormfront for season 2. In one episode, she ruthlessly tears down an apartment block and murders everyone in her way. The sheer power of the sequence is uncomfortably scintillating; but when it’s finally over, you realize you’ve been injected with a lot of false adrenaline. Her wickedness is simply another promise of what’s to come, and not a pay-off for witnessing any real dynamic with her fellow gods and goddesses. Stormfront, essentially, can blow up an apartment block and kill a bunch of innocent people because she has no stakes attached to her end of the story arc - yet.   

The Boys is great at posing interesting questions, but also reliable at procrastinating in addressing them - without investing any of that down-time in some three-dimensional character-building. Shit just will happen, and then audience and cast alike are just expected to deal.

I love love love the premise of the thing - heroes as villains - but damn. What I’d do for a classic Dr. Doom speech, a good old-fashioned evil scheme, and a cackling getaway.