The Boys (2019-2022/Season 1-3)

 

Rating: ★★★★ 

There's a lot to love about The Boys. Awesome, colourful and a wide-range of intriguing characterisations that all revolve around the central figure of Homelander, whose actor, Antony Starr, constantly puts in knockout performance after knockout performance, especially from season 2 onwards. Its anti-superhero spiel is a quite obvious yet still genius masterstroke in this superhero era of movies and TV. In addition, it brings more relevance and emphasis to its satire by incorporating the current state of affairs and spectacle of real-life American politics into its fictional storyworld. 

But easily the best trait of this show is its daring trait of pushing the boundaries in terms of violence, gore, visual creativity and conventional storytelling subversion. It is perhaps the best show at doing exactly that since the best days of Game of Thrones. And also, its comedy pulls off a nice balance between sappy/corny and absolutely hilarious - with surprising beat twists and absolute gem cameos from executive producer Seth Rogen here and there.

The only big problem that prevents The Boys from being a 5-star show is that, unlike prime Game of Thrones, it has no dignity to follow through with all its promised storytelling ambiguity and sleight of hand. It always drops the ball in every season finale by pandering to the obvious, or by completely abandoning plotlines that seemed to be prominent or certain to reach more of a climactic point by season's end.

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