Boys, The
Entry updated 29 August 2025. Tagged: TV.
US tv series (2019-current). Kripke Enterprises, Point Grey Pictures, Original Film, Kickstart Entertainment, KFL Nightsky Productions, Amazon MGM Studios, Sony Pictures Television. Created by Eric Kripke, based on the Comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Various writers and directors. Cast includes Laz Alonso, Tomer Capone, Aya Cash, Chace Crawford, Claudia Doumit, Karen Fukuhara, Dominique McElligott, Colby Minifie, Nathan Mitchell, Erin Moriarty, Jack Quaid, Elisabeth Shue, Antony Starr, Karl Urban and Jesse T Usher. 4 seasons of 8 episodes each; one further season due to air in 2026. Each episode 55-70 minutes. Colour.
The "supes" known as The Seven are a group of celebrity Superheroes created by Vought International, a pharmaceutical company with its roots in Nazi Germany, which keeps the serum it uses to create them a closely guarded and valuable secret. Away from the cameras and their carefully managed images, each of the supes is far more concerned with maintaining their fame and revenue than with doing good; they have a cavalier disregard for human life. After his girlfriend is accidentally killed by a supe chasing a criminal, Hughie (Quaid) joins The Boys, a CIA-sponsored group dedicated to bringing down Vought and The Seven. The Boys are led by the unstable and violent former soldier Billy Butcher (Urban), who has reasons from his past for hating The Seven, particularly their equally unstable and violent leader, Homelander (Starr).
Hughie begins a relationship with one of The Seven, the initially naïve and idealistic Annie/Starlight (Moriarty), who secretly joins The Boys when the true nature of Vought and The Seven becomes clear to her. In the second season, The Seven are joined by Stormfront (Cash), a Nazi who draws Homelander into her dreams of an Aryan future ruled by white superheroes (see Race in SF). Further developments see Butcher and Homelander both attempting to influence would-be President Victoria Neuman (Doumit), who is secretly a supe, and Ryan, a child who was born when Homelander raped Butcher's wife, and who has powers of his own. Homelander and his team overthrow the owners of Vought, and begin a violent and seemingly successful campaign to bring right-wing members of their public into their fight for ultimate power. Butcher, despite his hatred of supes, injects himself with the serum, seeing getting Superpowers as the only way to fight The Seven. Season 4 ends with The Boys rounded up and arrested as Homelander triumphant after a violent coup.
Barely toning down the gleeful excesses of the original comics, The Boys is Television's most savage and exuberant Satire of the fascistic undercurrents of so many superhero power fantasies. The over-the-top violence and sexual explicitness do little to mask the darkness of the basic premise, that it is entirely naïve to assume that anyone with unlimited power would choose to use it for the common good, or that swathes of the public would love them any less for this. This bleakness extends to the characters, all of whom are deeply and irreversibly messed up, in ways which blur the lines between good and bad until such terms are meaningless. The increased parallels with real-life US politics, which by the fourth season are unmistakable and unsubtle, caused some debate.
There have been several spin-off series. The nine-episode online Seven on 7 (2021) consists of mock news reports which also serve as part of the marketing campaign for the main series. The eight-episode animated Diabolical (2022) comprises stand-alone stories set in the same world as The Boys. Gen V (2023-current) – first season of eight episodes; further series to follow – is set in a school for supes. [CWa]
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