Help: We’re stuck in a time loop! It’s June, there’s a new season of The boysand people are talking – again! – about conservative fans of the Amazon Prime series who allegedly just discovered the politics of his favorite show. It seems like not much has changed in the two years since the bloody, sickening superhero satire launched its third season, the response to which has been, as the party line defines it, by right-wing fans, finally waking up to the fact that this show absolutely does not support them. Back then, I wrote about how The boys‘ social media accounts were embracing his many one-star reviews from Amazon for Season 3, in which there is a racist vigilante superhero who overpolices black people and a scene in which the show’s big bad, Homelander (Antony Starr), takes a laser look at a guy at a protest, gets applauded for it, and decides it’s time to drop his rigid public facade, because people like him even more when he is bad. This time, the resistance is coming even faster and harder: this season, Screen Rant noted, marks the first time The boys it earned an audience-generated Rotten Tomatoes score that’s low enough to qualify for the site’s “certified rotten” designation. (Critics, at least, seem to like Season 4; its score is 95% “fresh.”)
Are these negative reviews from the public, then and now, simply the result of a critical right-wing bashing campaign, or are they actually evidence of some new revelation on the part of the show’s longtime fans? Hard to know. As the show’s enthusiasts love to point out whenever another round of MAGA mockery Boys fans begin, even though series jerk Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed herself to be a secret villain, she’s always clearly pointed her sharpest darts to the right, and it seems impossible to believe anyone could watch a single episode without seeing that. In Season 1, Homelander gave a George W. Bush-style speech after a disaster he secretly caused, and in Season 2, he dated a Nazi superhero named Stormfront, for crying out loud. The new season, which premiered on June 13, takes place between election night, when we discover that a ticket featuring anti-“supposed” politician Robert Singer and secret politician Victoria Neuman won the presidency, and January 6 (!) , when the votes will be certified. The Boys, our ragtag band of opposition fighters trying to take down Vought, the superhero-creating corporation that runs almost everything in this world and wants to run even more, knows that Neuman and Homelander are plotting Singer’s assassination on January 6th. This would leave Neuman as president and Homelander’s puppet – an outcome the Boys will do much to avoid.
This season is increasingly filled with visual gags, characters, and lines that are one-for-one analogues to our world. The bandits criticize the “critical theory of supremacy”, accuse Boys members of being pedophiles and murder migrants at the border. Jeffrey Epstein exists in the world, and in a powerful cocktail party, a ghoul in a suit corners Neuman to tell him all about how women can’t get pregnant if he’s actually rape. The new character Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a conspiracy theorist streamer who was elevated to the Seven – the team led by Homelander – because of her grassroots appeal, was, showrunner Eric Kripke recently said, conceived during conversations in which the writers reflected on how “scary” Marjorie Taylor Greene is. On his show, Firecracker accuses Annie January (Erin Moriarty), the former member of the Seven who left Vought and joined the Boys, of running a “dungeon” where she imprisons teenagers she lured with the promise of help. (Moriarty was heavily harassed online after last season, and some aspects of that harassment appear to have been worked into Annie’s storyline this season.)
A few years ago, Kripke said that Homelander’s similarity to Donald Trump (both are only concerned with domination, have deep-seated insecurities, and are both terrifying men who are also over-the-top queens for good) was deepening as time went on. “I admit I’m a little balder this season than I have been in previous seasons,” Kripke told Rolling Stone in 2022. “But the world is getting coarser and less elegant. … We’ve gotten angrier and more scared as the years have gone by, so that’s just being reflected in our writing.” This month, Kripke told Variety: “We lucked out with a show whose metaphor is really about the moment we live in, which is the cross section of celebrity and authoritarianism. … When we realized that, we thought, ‘Well, we have to go all the way.’ ” Asked if he thought it was possible to be “too political,” he said, “I’m just going to lean into it, and then the audience can decide whether they want to watch it or not.”
Leaving aside the question of whether it’s wrong to mock the right in this way, is this slanted, unhinged mode of political satire still fun to watch? The boys has always suffered from a lack of interest in developing a theory about who the people opposing Vought could be. There are our six boys, plus some allies in the “deep state” and within Vought, and some of Annie’s employees at her teen refuge center, which means nothing. no has a basement, as an aspiring vigilante discovers this season. Then there are the many anonymous “Starlighters” who support Annie in her anti-Vought crusade and who dress in yellow and get into street battles with Vought’s “Hometeamers.” The boys themselves are fun, but the rest of the opposition is a cipher, offering little balance against the firehose of perfectly evil characters being funny on Vought’s side.
But maybe the show wasn’t what changed. Maybe we have. The series’ reception this time around shows how difficult it can be to nail down the political vibe in 2024. (It certainly doesn’t help that Season 4 ended in April 2023; its release was delayed by the writers’ strike.) On the show’s subreddit, a user who didn’t seem to fit the profile of a right-winger Boys hater posted: “The boys You can and absolutely should poke fun at the MAGA crowd, but there’s so much more going on with this country and the current zeitgeist that it feels… superficial. We’ve had two new big wars, inflation, AI and lots of other craziness since the release of S3 and we’re just getting a pretty safe stab at the culture wars.”
This comment wasn’t particularly popular, but I think the user is right. The problem The boys What Democrats face in trying to stay sharp and relevant in 2024 is exactly the same problem Democrats face in trying to get people excited about voting against Donald Trump again. Right-wing politics and culture, now genuinely terrifying, have for years been an extremely target-rich environment for satirists. But no matter how real these goals are, anyone can get tired of anything that goes on for too long. We found out this month that there will only be one more season of The boys, spin-offs aside. I think that’s all right.
