Television | Superheroes

The Boys: Sex, Drugs & Red Capes

I finally watched the first three seasons of ‘The Boys’, which I’ve wanted to watch for a long time, in one sitting. I will start watching the new season shortly. First of all, I would like to talk about The Boys, the team that gave the show its name.

Karl Urban’s ‘Billy Butcher’ is one of the most original characters I have seen on television in a long time. I thought I saw the actor for the first time in this series, but it turns out that I’ve seen him in Lord of the Rings and Thor: Ragnarok; he was always in front of my eyes. I’m always happy when actors who have carefully and quietly built their careers over the years find the right role and become world-renowned.

Jack Quaid, who plays ‘Hughie’, is undoubtedly the sweetest and most sympathetic face of the show. I wished I had met him earlier and guess what? He was voicing Clark Kent in ‘My Adventures with Superman’! Now I understand why I warmed up to him so much.

I love Tomer Capone’s ‘Frenchie’ because he reminds us to breathe and have a conscience in all this chaos.

I would like to talk about each character individually, but when you are immersed in a breathless action series, you don’t have time to connect and sympathize with each character.

Now, let’s talk about the show’s problem with Superheroes:

‘The Boys’ is like a truckload of manure dumped on the comic book and superhero oeuvre that has been carefully and passionately built over the years.

It destroys the messages that comic book literature tries to convey through superheroes, such as ‘there is good in every human being’ and ‘even the bad ones should be given a chance’. ‘The Boys’ insists that no human being can ever be moral and good enough.

In this respect, the screenwriters of ‘The Boys’ are either in deep despair that the whole world is in moral decay or they have a visual impairment that makes them think that ‘realistic cinema’ is all about sexual perversions, drugs and severed heads.

Yes, ‘The Boys’ is trying to be realistic cinema. But it reduces realistic cinema to the simplicity of ‘people injecting heroin into their arms and cutting each other’s heads off’. Realistic cinema exists to remind people in a traumatic way that blood, violence and death are bad. Not to make people watch ‘violence porn’ with funny music and slow motion.

I think this is the only point where they are flawed. Other than that, their brave criticism of ‘dangerous’ issues such as Populism, the Far Right, and Religious Abuse is definitely worth a standing ovation.

Result

‘The Boys’ takes on the heavy burden of criticizing religious abuse and capitalism through the metaphor of the ‘superhero’, the most sacred symbol of unfettered capitalism. However, all this effort turns into a failed parody due to screenwriters with worse observation and satirical skills than the people behind 2008’s ‘Superhero Movie’.