Help: We’re stuck in a time loop! It’s June, there’s a new season of The Boys, and people are talking—again!—about conservative fans of the Amazon Prime series who supposedly just figured out their favorite show’s politics. Not much has changed, it seems, in the two years since the bloody, disgusting superhero satire came out with its third season, the response to which was, as the party line went, defined by right-wing fans at last twigging to the fact that this show absolutely cannot stand them. Back then, I wrote about how The Boys’ social media accounts were embracing its many one-star Amazon reviews for Season 3, in which there’s a racist vigilante superhero who overpolices Black people and a scene in which the show’s big bad, Homelander (Antony Starr), laser-eyes a guy at a protest, gets applauded for it, and decides that it’s time to drop his stiff public façade because people like him even more when he’s mean. This time around, the pushback is coming even faster and harder: This season, Screen Rant noted, marks the first time The Boys has 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; their score stands at 95 percent “fresh.”)
Are these bad audience reviews, back then and now, merely the fruit of a right-wing review-bombing campaign, or are they truly evidence of some new revelation on the part of the show’s onetime fans? Hard to know. As the show’s enthusiasts love to point out whenever another round of mocking MAGA Boys fans starts up, although the series’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dupe turned out to be a secret baddie, it has always clearly aimed its sharpest darts rightward, and it seems impossible to believe that anyone could watch a single episode without seeing that. In Season 1, Homelander gave a very George W. Bush–esque 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 June 13, takes place between election night, when we find out that a ticket with anti-“supe” politician Robert Singer and secret-supe politician Victoria Neuman has won the presidency, and Jan. 6 (!), when the votes will be certified. The Boys, our ragtag band of opposition fighters trying to bring down Vought, the superhero-creating corporation that runs almost everything in this world and is looking to run even more, know that Neuman and Homelander plan an assassination of Singer on Jan. 6. This would leave Neuman as president, and a puppet of Homelander—an outcome the Boys will do much to prevent.
This season is increasingly peppered with visual gags, characters, and lines that are one-for-one analogs with our world. The bad guys decry “critical supe theory,” accuse members of the Boys of being pedophiles, and murder migrants on the border. Jeffrey Epstein exists in-world, and at a high-powered cocktail party, a ghoul in a suit corners Neuman to tell her all about how women can’t become pregnant if it’s really rape. New character Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a conspiracy-theorist streamer who gets elevated to the Seven—the team that Homelander leads—because of her appeal to the base, was, showrunner Eric Kripke said recently, conceived during conversations in which the writers reflected on how “scary” Marjorie Taylor Greene is. On her show, Firecracker accuses Annie January (Erin Moriarty), the former member of the Seven who has left Vought and joined the Boys, of having a “dungeon” where she imprisons teens she has lured with the promise of help. (Moriarty got trolled a lot online after the previous season, and some aspects of that harassment seem to have gotten worked into Annie’s storyline this season.)
A couple of years ago, Kripke said that Homelander’s resemblance to Donald Trump (both care only about domination, have deep-seated fundamental insecurities, and are peacocking males who are also campy queens for the ages) was deepening as time passed. “I’ll admit to being a little more bald this season than I have in past seasons,” Kripke told Rolling Stone in 2022. “But the world is getting more coarse and less elegant. … We’re angrier and more scared as the years go on, so that is just being reflected in our writing.” This month, Kripke told Variety, “We sort of lucked into a show whose metaphor is really about the moment we’re living in, which is the cross-section of celebrity and authoritarianism. … Once we realize that, we’re like, ‘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 sort of decide whether they want to watch or not.”
Putting aside the question of whether it’s wrong to poke fun at the right wing in this way, is this leaned-in, lopsided mode of political satire still fun to watch? The Boys has always suffered from a lack of interest in developing much of a theory of who the people who oppose Vought could be. There are our six Boys, plus a few allies in the “deep state” and inside Vought, and some employees of Annie’s at her teen refuge center, which does not have a basement, as a red-pilled aspiring vigilante finds out this season. Then there are the many anonymous “Starlighters” who support Annie in her anti-Vought crusade and who dress up in yellow and get in 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 fire hose of perfectly evil characters being funny on the Vought side.
But maybe the show isn’t what has changed. Maybe we have. The reception of the series this time around shows how difficult it can be to nail down the political vibe in 2024. (It surely doesn’t help that Season 4 wrapped in April 2023; its release was delayed by the writers strike.) On the show’s subreddit, a user who seemed not to otherwise fit the profile of a right-wing Boys hater posted: “The Boys can and absolutely should be poking 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 2 new major wars, inflation, AI, and so much other craziness since S3 dropped and we’re just getting a fairly safe stab at the culture wars.”
This comment was not particularly popular, but I think the user has a point. The problem The Boys is running up against in attempting to stay sharp and relevant in 2024 is exactly the same problem the Democrats have in trying to get people re-excited about voting against Donald Trump. Right-wing politics and culture, currently genuinely terrifying, has for years been an extremely target-rich environment for satirists. But, real as those targets may be, anyone can tire of anything if it goes on for too long. We found out this month that there will be only one more season of The Boys, spinoffs aside. I think that’s just about right.