Amazon Prime’s latest series The Boys is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Garth Ennis, the same novelist behind Preacher. The show is also produced by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan, who helped to develop the Preacher television series. So is it safe to say that The Boys is just as raunchy, gory, and sacrilegiously irreverent as Preacher? Sadly, it may be much worse.
The series, which premiered July 26, takes place in a world where superheroes not only exist but are heavily supported by a huge marketing firm as major celebrities. The most famous among them is a team known as The Seven who focus more on movie deals, merchandising rights, and public appearances over actually helping people.
Unbeknownst to the public, however, most of these “heroes” are actually vile, inconsiderate jerks who abuse drugs, coerce sex, and even leave people to die when inconvenient for them. To try and keep the “supes” in line, a mercenary group known as “The Boys” aims to find and kill the heroes who step out of line.
In episode five “Good for the Soul,” the Seven make an appearance at a Christian convention known as Believe Expo. One of them, Starlight (Erin Moriarty), happens to be devoutly religious, but that doesn’t stop the show from being profoundly offensive to Catholics and Protestants alike. It turns out this show is a lot closer to Preacher than we assumed.
Boys leader Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) seems to have a special fondness for words beginning with “c.”
[Language warning]
Priest: I'm not really sure what you're saying, son.
Billy: I'm saying, if there is some geezer up here with a big white beard, he's a world heavyweight cunt.
Priest: I'm sorry, did you just call God a C-word?
Billy: Yeah, he's got a hard-on for mass murder and giving kids cancer and his big old answer to the existential clusterfuck that is humanity is to nail his own bleeding son to a plank. That is a cunt move. Come on, even you got to agree with me there... We should lob a fucking nuke at him, get it over and done with. You know what I'm saying? ... All right, good talk. Think about it. I'm here all day, all right?
The expo’s host Ezekial (Shaun Benson) is the stereotypical religious parody who preaches that Jesus said things like, “Hey bro. People who have faith, those are my peeps, y’all.” As a parody, he’s also revealed to be a hypocrite who supports “pray the gay away” practices while having male threesomes on the side. Good to know that that worn-out cliché is still alive in 2019.
Our protagonists are hardly any better. Even Starlight, who actually believes in God and Jesus Christ, makes a speech openly questioning and rejecting parts of the Bible like it’s empowering.
Starlight: Every word that I say up here, I’m reading from a script. I didn’t write any of these words. I don’t even know if I believe in them. I mean, I believe in God, I love God so much, but honestly, it’s…it’s just how goddamn certain everyone is around here. I mean, tickets start at, what, 170 bucks, so that these people can tell you how to go to heaven? How do they know? How does anybody know? When the Bible was written, life expectancy was 30 years old. I mean, I’m not so sure you’re supposed to take it literally. It also says that it’s a sin to eat shrimp. What, if you’re gay or if you’re Gandhi, you’re going to hell? I mean…and if you have sex before marriage that’s…that’s not immoral. That’s human.
With eight episodes, the season contains a lot more unwanted gems like that. The series lays out its worst qualities almost immediately. The pilot “The Name of the Game” features such awful details like two on-screen penis shots and a gruesome death via a hero with super-speed. And that doesn’t count the number of f-bombs and other crude words.
A supposedly patriotic “supe” known as Homelander (Anthony Starr) eliminates his enemies through heat vision and literally ripping hearts out of bodies. Considering Homeland wears an American flag as a cape, he’s both violent and disrespectful of United States symbols. He might as well be an Antifa member with those qualities. Despite being a sociopathic jerk in reality, he pretends to act like a religious member himself at the Believe Expo.
The Boys is yet another example of writers trying to be edgy by portraying superheroes as psychos and regular people as God-haters. All of it has to be peppered with gratuitous violence and f-bombs for fear of the audience getting bored. Perhaps the title The Boys is appropriate since these people never seem to grow up.
