It Was the Perfect Show for the Time We’re Living In. What Happened?

Back when it premiered, The Boys was the perfect show for its moment. In 2019, the box office was eclipsed by Avengers: Endgame, the apex of global Marvel mania, which came equipped with a flimsy set of politics positioned, implicitly, against the rising tide of fascism. During the Trump years, mass culture became overrun by mascots—usually superheroes—making content-light declarations about the world we ought to live in, with Iron Man and his Disney overlord leading the charge. So it was cathartic to have Homelander, A-Train, The Deep, and Black Noir reminding us, in no uncertain terms, that we were living in hell. The Boys focused on Vought International, a massive multilevel conglomerate with investments in the entertainment, pharmaceutical, and paramilitary sectors. Vought is fronted by an inner circle of sociopathic superheroes, forming something of a dark Justice League, who seem to leave nothing but personal injury lawsuits in their wake. The first few seasons of the show touched on everything from police brutality to mealymouthed corporate social justice solidarity, but its dominant theme was one of feeling helpless and vulnerable in the face of towering capital and political collusion. I wasn’t surprised that it became a hit.

Five years later, The Boys has just wrapped up its fourth and penultimate season. The show is still a hit, but after taking in the season finale on Thursday, I couldn’t help but feel like its relentless satire—once the series’ calling card—has grown surprisingly toothless. This is odd, because in some ways, The Boys has rarely been more connected to the national discourse. The finale was initially titled “Assassination Run” in reference to the episode’s major twist, the gruesome killing of the duplicitous vice president–elect Victoria Neuman, paving the road for Homelander to ascend toward deep-state supremacy. The parallels with the Trump assassination attempt were so stark that Amazon removed the name from the episode and added a content warning to its front end—which could be read as a ward against those who might be triggered by either the bloodshed or the prospects of a second Trump term in general. So yes, the gore is still in place; same with the frothing contempt for sanitized corporate posturing and, if we’re being honest, American culture as a whole. (The Boys is based on a comic book written by legendary author Garth Ennis, an Irishman who has always enjoyed toying around with some anti-Yank sentiment.) But for the first time in its run, The Boys is beginning to feel dated. Something in its skeleton is misaligned; now it sounds like a creature screaming at a world that no longer exists.

The Boys has been trending this way for a while, even if it took this season for the shift to become grossly pronounced. In its previous two seasons, the show became much more direct in its satire. In particular, it began to single out MAGAdom—and the political actors who exploit it—as the reason for America’s ongoing societal unraveling, and the evil our heroes must fight against. This provoked a baffling rebuke from some conservative fans of the series, who apparently didn’t comprehend that Homelander, an ersatz star-spangled Superman with an unsettling love of breast milk and an innate cruelty toward anyone he deems beneath his genetic superiority, was an obvious send-up of the former president and his enablers. Their backlash was wildly misguided, and you get the sense that showrunner Eric Kripke has enjoyed twisting the knife in the reactionary segments of his audience—reminding them, in no uncertain terms, who the butt of the joke is.

But lately, I’ve also been questioning the relevancy of The Boys’ Trump parable, especially when it’s presented with exhausting specificity. I’ll give you an example. In the beginning of Season 4, we’re introduced to a minor antagonist named Firecracker who operates a highly editorialized (and often conspiratorial) media brand that is positioned as a parallel to Infowars. Later, one of her newly radicalized followers charges into the base of operations for our heroes asserting that children are being held captive in the basement. (He uses the code word “cheese pizza,” or “CP,” online jargon for child porn.) It is a complete replication of the infamous Pizzagate scandal—beat for beat—with no additional commentary burnishing a reference that is now more than seven years old. The scene, like many in The Boys, attempts to provoke or enrage, but it fails on both of those fronts. It’s not offensive, it’s boring. Who is capable of becoming shocked by the bewildering realities of our confused country? Especially after we’ve all been living in this fog for so long?

These clichés persist throughout the season. Every episode, The Boys gobbles up a slew of Fox News–chyron inflection points and reproduces them, with free-associative haphazardness, throughout the script. A character mentions that her political platform will confront “Critical Supe Theory.” Firecracker repeatedly warns that Tom Hanks and Oprah are involved in a cloak-and-dagger pedophile ring. Homelander supporters don red hats, all championing the slogan “MAKE AMERICA SUPER AGAIN.” There is talk about invoking the 25^th Amendment, an arcane bit of bureaucratic legalese that has nonetheless become a kitchen-table topic over the past eight years. Of course, all of this culminates with the season finale’s fractious presidential election, where it’s an open question whether the electors will certify the results. The parody is so didactic that it practically becomes meaningless. The touchstones are far too close to the source. The Boys seems to be single-mindedly obsessed with depicting a society that is sick in a very familiar way. Beyond that, it’s out of ideas.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is entirely Kripke’s fault. We are living in a different world than the one The Boys first inhabited, and, naturally, some of its original danger has been chipped away by market forces outside of its control. (For instance: The Marvel Cinematic Universe is in the midst of a lengthy decline, while The Boys is in the midst of its own Amazon-funded catalog expansion.) But I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say that I am beyond my limit with Trump-era entertainment. We are thoroughly oversaturated with movies and TV shows eager to dress up their fascists in red hats with psychic dominion of a rowdy mass of exurb lunatics. It doesn’t matter if the script centers around a cabal of sadistic superheroes or an asteroid hurtling toward Earth; all of the creative imagination in these projects is reduced to the same flavor of rage—and rage alone. Subtext is dead, and Trump killed it. Please, for the love of God, let us discover a post-MAGA entertainment industry. There must be something else to say.