1x01 The Name of the Game

[8.1/10] “What if the D.C. superheroes were bad?” is such a stale premise these days. Alan Moore nearly perfected the idea early with Watchmen. Zach Snyder’s been lapping up his scraps ever since. The DCAU did it. Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths did it.* Justice League: Gods and Monsters* did it. There's not much juice left in that orange.

Yet, somehow, in its opening salvo, The Boys makes the idea feel fresh again. It revitalizes the subgenre in two ways. The first is that the heroes aren’t evil in some grandiose, outsized, sort of way. They are assholes in the prosaic, real world sort of way that actors and athletes and other powerful people are.

They aren’t evil for the sake of evil, in search of power or domination or god knows what else. Instead, they are sexual harssers. They’re jerks who use their invisibility to spy on their co-workers in restrooms. They’re whatever the opposite of an ally is. They’re superstars who laugh about the “little people” who suffer from their escapades and give insincere forced apologies. They are not absolute power corrupted; they’re simply debaucherous hypocrites, the kind of mundane evil that infects the halls of power much more than demigods gone wrong.

They’re also a corporate product. What’s interesting about The Seven (a thinly-veiled version of the Justice League) is that they’re not just a collection of superpowered jerks. They are a fully privatized, commodified, marketed property, replete with corporate earnings statements, PR campaigns, sales to municipal governments (and maybe national defense), movies, memes, and merchandise.

In that, the show is poised not only to comment on the idea of what it would be like if the noble warriors we look up to weren’t so noble, but also on how much comic book ephemera has permeated our culture. The blend of superhero fandom and corporate profiteering is a live issue in the real world, one that introduces queasy questions about the intersection of art and commerce that only get queasier when you throw law enforcement and the military-industrial complex into the mix. There's rich worldbuilding out of the gate here, taking a cynical view of how we would treat the advent of metahumans in our society that positions The Boys to satirize both fiction and reality.

And yet, the second part of what makes this opening hour so successful, and the thing that makes it exciting as a T.V. show, is how it roots all that worldbuilding in the perspectives of two characters we can relate to and feel for. It channels the broader problems this superhero system represents through problems two individuals face, and we can understand why they’re so disillusioned and ready to fight so quickly.

One is Annie, an aspiring hero and true believer plucked from obscurity to join The Seven. She’s earnest, trained for this all her life, and has been stage-mom’d to death to get there. She genuinely wants to save the world, a literal and figurative bastion of light who gets to live her dream of joining the heroes she so admires as an equal in the cause of justice.

Only, as soon as she gets there, her idealistic view of them is shattered in an instant. She’s blackmailed and coerced into sexually gratifying one of her “partners.” She discovers who they are behind closed doors and how much more they’re concerned with points on the package than saving lives. And she can’t even tell anyone about it, not even her mom, because it would disappoint the kids like her, who admire them so, or the parent who’s so proud of her daughter’s achievements.

It’s a smart choice all around. It lets the audience put ourselves in Annie’s place, like so many kids who dream of fighting crime alongside Superman and Batman and the other powerful champions of the page and the screen. Imagining what it would be like if those daydreams ran aground on a demoralizing case of “never meet your heroes” gives her experience power and a strange form of relatability for anyone who achieved some measure of their dreams only to find out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

It helps us to root for Starlight when she resolved to be a fighter and stand-up to the bullshit. She recognizes her own power, and is reassured that even if she fell down, she can get back up and try all over again.

She gets that (low-key inspiring) advice in a chance meeting with Hughie, the other lead in this episode. His perspective is just as relatable -- one of the little guys whose existence is stepped on by the connected and powerful, with little recourse to puncture their sterling image. The episode does masterful work at setting up he and his girlfriend as a cute, nascent couple with a fun dynamic and playful but endearing future ahead of them, one that’s shattered when a speedster races through her and pulverizes her in the process. It’s a shock, but not one for shock value. It’s emblematic of the callousness and impunity with which heroes like A-Train operate.

We see Hughie fighting against a system stacked against him, built to favor “supes”. He has panic attacks when he’s left without the love of his life and yet has to see his girlfriend’s killer put on cereal boxes and sports drinks like a smiling paragon of virtue. Here is the other part of that hypocrisy, how the champions ostensibly devoted to lifting up the little guy are actually oblivious to them, uncaring, maybe even downright hostile.

Hughie has an arc in response to this epiphany. He goes from being a guy too scared to ask his boss for a raise to someone who could choose to run away, but instead uses his smarts to help kill one of The Seven. He’s nervous as hell, but still pulls off planting a bug in their tower at the behest of a mysterious benefactor posing as an FBI agent. Despite his father’s warning that, however noble Hughie’s cause, the kid’s just not a fighter, learning the truth about the heroes who dominate his culture, and losing the person he cares about most, spurs him to fight when it counts. The disillusionment brings Hughey and Annie together, but so too does the resolution to fight back against this metahuman assholes.

The one exception is Homelander, the Superman analogue. In contrast to the other heroes, he seems fine and upstanding. He doesn’t frequent the capes-only club where heroes congregate to do their dirty deeds. He disclaims his fellow Justice Leaguers’ complaints about dollars and cents in favor of discussions of heroic acts. Sure, he melts a bank robbers’ hand to his gun with heat vision and knocks another one into next Tuesday, but they were holding young kids hostage with machine guns. Maybe they deserved it.

Only, in the end, he uses his powers not to protect the innocent or stand up for truth, justice, and the American way as it existed in 1930s comic books. He uses them to destroy an airplane with a child on it, because his father played hardball with the CEO of the corporation who manages the heroes and threatened to expose a scandalous secret. And in the end, he smiles at it.

Maybe he thinks he’s acting for the greater good. Maybe he’s a heartless tool who does whatever his corporate masters tell him without thought or question. Maybe he’s just better at wearing the mask on- and off-stage better than his colleagues. Either way, he’s no hero. The Boys is far from the first to explore that idea. But with ideas, and stories, and a world this good right out of the gate, it has a chance to be one of the best.

• Selfie? Yay!
• Homelander because "Homeland Security"? He's got a flag as his cape
• Omg, his girlfriend vanished
• What a useless superhero
• SIMON PEGG
• He's got an American accent :O
• Aw, I like that characterisation (he imagines he could say that but doesn't)
• Simon Pegg, you sicko, no. ;-;
• 200-plus superheroes? Omg
• Oof, the branding
• Bro, that perv
• He's blackmailing now? Wtf
• Jimmy Fallon, lol
• It's Dredd!

Billy Butcher: "You'll love it."
Hughie: "Uh, not likely."

• Wtf, this place is messed up
• Wow, she's nice (not)
• God, she can't tell her mum cause she's so proud
• Don't meet your heroes
• Ah, our protagonists meet
• Dredd is confident
• Homelander is an interesting dude. He doesn't seem like an asshole like the other supes
• Dredd is still a badass (hitting that guy with a car)

Man, that was great. What an intro. I love the characterisation of Hughie and Annie (I'm so glad they decided to show a hero with an outsider's perspective). Like, this world is messed up. Nobody here (except Annie) seems to have a code. They all seem like assholes. And getting a normal person's perspective is great too. Like, two really unique perspectives you don't get in superhero media. God, I'm hyped.