The Boys’ precarious balance between ultra-violence and meaning

It’s so violent it blows away any pretence of good taste, moderation or restraint. And we love it.

The Boys is on Prime. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

Preview episodes for Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys come with very specific instructions on what you can and can’t reveal.

It’s an extensive list and there’s good reason why the powers that be don’t want pesky media going into any details about the anti-superhero show’s many, many antics. The Boys is a series that relies heavily on shock – it’s its raison d’etre – so it doesn’t want to set up precise expectations.

But you should know that there is a death scene in the first episode – a particularly grisly, violent and wildly inventive sequence – that will blow away all pretence of good taste, moderation or restraint.

Who needs good taste when you have jaw-dropping violence that makes last season’s whale scene look like silver service high tea? And the “oh no they didn’t” starts well before any character’s heart stops beating.

That speaks to The Boys’ ballsy attitude in how it executes its ambitious vision. The question is whether the thematic strengths of its first two seasons are sustainable – because being raucously violent is one thing, but if you don’t have something else to back it up, then it really is just in bad taste.

That’s the balance The Boys always has to strike.

The Boys loves a bit of ultra-violence. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

The series cemented itself as a pulpy, devourable and captivating series not just because it was pacy and dramatic.

It also had a strong perspective on things like venal corporate culture or hyper-consumerism, as expressed through how its throng of superheroes (the Captain America-like Homelander or the Wonder Woman-esque Maeve) were willing participants in a system which exploited people for profit.

Or the second season’s introduction of Stormfront, a charismatic populist superhero whose hidden agenda was fascism. She was a literal Nazi and there was a lot of power in exploring the very real threat of white supremacy in 2020 in the run-up to the Trump-Biden election.

The thematic throughline of the third season is slower to reveal itself, and there is a shift in that the series seems more interested in individual character arcs than it is in a didactic exercise about social ills.

Not that it abandons that completely because repositioning Homelander (Anthony Starr) as someone who becomes sick of apologising for something he doesn’t think he did wrong, well, that plays right into the tussle between cancellation and accountability.

Homelander is still a sociopath. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

The Boys returns for its third season. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

The fallout from the previous season finds Butcher (Karl Urban) sticking to non-fatal supe-catching, reporting to Hughie (Jack Quaid) and his boss Victoria (Claudia Doumit), who secretly explodes heads.

Homelander’s star is on the wane (being in love with a Nazi tends to have that effect) and his approval numbers are on a rapid decline – and you know Vought loves a datapoint to work out how to sell more stuff.

The early episodes are pitched as a scheme to take down Homelander and – this is in the trailer so not a spoiler – a little temporary compound V may just allow Butcher to match up.

Then, of course, there’s the return of OG super Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) whose explosive presence will really gummy up the works.

The Boys has laid its foundation. If you’re still in the game, you care about these characters and it’s to the writers’ credit that you care about so many characters because it is a large ensemble.

That emotional connection makes all the ultra-violence that much easier to stomach.

The Boys season three is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video