For today's Tuesday TV Touchbase, I'm going to look at TV series that came out last year on Amazon Prime but only last week did I have time to watch it, The Boys.
The Boys is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. It's set in a world where super heroes are real, brightly colored icons of good and justice to the public at large. Away from the eyes of the public, these super heroes are mostly profane, self serving, arrogant pricks.
These so called heroes are owned by Vought International, a powerful corporation that controls every aspect of these super powered beings. These super beings are marketed and monetized in every way possible. They are an insanely valuable commodity and Vought will do anything to protect their investments.
At the pinnacle of the Vought super hero hierarchy is The Seven, a sort of Justice League for this world. This team is led by Homelander, a man with Superman level abilities and an American flag for a cape. He is also egotistical and unstable. Homelander, when he drops the smiles and the upbeat rhetoric for the adoring masses, is scary as fuck.
There's an opening to join The Seven and the lucky winner of that break is Annie January, a blonde haired innocent from Iowa who as Starlight has high level energy powers and an actually sincere hopeful outlook that she just wants to help people.
So naturally on her first day at work, she's sexually assaulted by a fellow member of The Seven, the aquatic hero known as The Deep. So begins the erosion of Annie's beliefs and aspirations.
Meanwhile and elsewhere, we meet a Hugh Campbell, a young man, reserved and unassuming, a big fan of super heroes. Until one of them runs into his girlfriend, Robin.
I mean, literally runs into her. At super speed.
The slow motion impact of a person running at super speed hitting a human body is gruesome and horrifying. A stunned and traumatized Hugh is left holding Robin's hands.
And only her hands.
The rest of her is a bloody pulp.
A-Train, The Seven's resident super speedster, only stops a second and then runs off.
So begins the descent of Hugh Campbell into revenge and murder.
Hugh gets a visit from a bearded man with a British accent and a blunt demeanor. His name is Billy Butcher and he wants to give Hugh a chance to get even with the super powered bastards who killed Robin.
Except Billy doesn't say "bastards". Billy's favorite descriptive euphemism for super powered people ("Supes") and the people who enable them is "cunts".
Billy brings together a couple of operatives to help in his mission against the Supes, The Boys of the title. They are working off the books without official sanction.
The violence in The Boys is extremely graphic. Besides the death of Robin, Hugh gets covered in the bloody mess of another body when a Supe gets blown up. Fist fights usually result in someone getting pounded into a bloody pulp. You will get to see what kind of damage heat vision can do to a human body. It's not pretty.
This series is also very emotionally intense. Hugh's sadness and trauma are palpable. Billy's rage is unrelenting. Annie's frustrations are continually knotted up tighter and tighter.
The depravity of the Supes and their support team reaches down lower and lower. Homelander, all wholesome smiles with uplifting platitudes, is the worst of the bunch. He has absolutely no chill about anything that does not go his way. He is spoiled, petulant and expects nothing less than complete capitulation to his expectations.
Billy Butcher hates all Supes but Homelander gets his most intense loathing. Billy's wife Becca disappeared 8 years ago after being raped by Homelander. Either abducted into hiding or murdered directly by Homelander or by someone with Vought, Billy's one driving purpose in his sad, miserable, angry existence is to see Homelander answer for this.
Which makes the end of the first season particularly heartbreaking for Billy Butcher.
I guess by not getting to The Boys until now instead of last year, I've spared myself the frustration of a year's wait to see how the end of season 1 plays out in season 2.
The Boys is a challenge. It is a harsh look at super heroes, particularly for someone with a more idealized view of the concept. It is a brutal assessment of the human condition, of the price we are prepared to pay to get what we want, what happens to our beliefs and aspirations, even our faith, when that price becomes due.
The Boys does what it does very well. But what it does is very brutal and unrelenting.
_____________________________________
Other TV stuff:
Saw the 2nd @Home edition of Saturday Night Live. A lot more production tricks in this latest episode with the home shot videos being obviously edited by professionals somewhere. The episode opened strong with Brad Pitt as Dr. Faucy provided pointed clarifications to Donald Trump's various lies and misstatements.
Sunday was busy with all new episodes of Outlander, Killing Eve and Batwoman. More about those in a future installment of the Tuesday TV Touchbase.
No comments:
Post a Comment